The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “I understand,” Naqi said, realising as she did how sullen and childlike she sounded; how much she was playing the petulant younger sister. The worst of it was that she knew Mina was right. At dawn it all seemed much clearer.

  “Do you? Really?”

  Naqi nodded, feeling the perverse euphoria that came with an admission of defeat. “Yes. Really. We’d have been wrong to chase them.”

  Mina sighed. “I was tempted, you know. I just didn’t want you to see how tempted I was, or else you’d have found a way to convince me.”

  “I’m that persuasive?”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself, sis. I know I never would.” Mina paused and took back the swab. “I’ll finish this. Can you handle the sweep program?”

  Naqi smiled. She felt better now. The tension between them would still take a little while to lift, but at least things were easier now. Mina was right about something else: they were best friends, not just sisters.

  “I’ll handle it,” Naqi said.

  Naqi stepped through the hermetic curtain into the air-conditioned cool of the gondola. She closed the door, rubbed her eyes, and then sat down at the navigator’s station. The airship had flown itself automatically from Umingmaktok, adjusting its course to take cunning advantage of jet streams and weather fronts. Now it was in hovering mode: once or twice a minute the electrically driven motors purred, stabilising the craft against gusts of wind generated by the microclimate above the Juggler node. Naqi called up the current avionics program, a menu of options appearing on a flat screen. The options quivered; Naqi thumped the screen with the back of her hand until the display behaved itself. Then she scrolled down through the other flight sequences, but there was no preprogrammed spiral loaded into the current avionics suite. Naqi rummaged around in the background files, but there was nothing to help her there either. She was about to start hacking something together – at a push it would take her half an hour to assemble a routine – when she remembered that she had once backed up some earlier avionics files onto the fan. She had no idea if they were still there, or even if there was anything useful among the cache, but it was probably worth taking the time to find out. The fan lay closed on a bench, where Mina must have left it after she verified that the blackout was still in force.

  Naqi grabbed the fan and spread it open across her lap. To her surprise, it was still active: instead of the usual watercolour patterns the display showed the messages she had been scrolling through earlier.

  She looked closer and frowned. These were not her messages at all. She was looking at the messages Mina had copied onto the fan during the night. At this realisation Naqi felt an immediate prickle of guilt. She knew that she should snap the fan shut, or at the very least close her sister’s mail and delve into her own area of the fan. But she did neither of those things. Telling herself that it was only what anyone else would have done, she accessed the final message in the list and examined its incoming time-stamp. To within a few minutes, it had arrived at the same time as the final message Naqi had received.

  Mina had been telling the truth when she said that the blackout was continuing.

  Naqi glanced up. Through the window of the gondola she could see the back of her sister’s head, bobbing up and down as she checked winches along the side.

  Naqi looked at the body of the message. It was nothing remarkable, just an automated circular from one of the Juggler special-interest groups. Something about neurotransmitter chemistry.

  She exited the circular, getting back to the list of incoming messages. She told herself that she had done nothing shameful so far. If she closed Mina’s mail now, she would have nothing to feel guilty about.

  But a name she recognized jumped out at her from the list of messages: Dr Jotah Sivaraksa, manager of the Moat project. The man she had met in Umingmaktok, glowing with renewed vitality after his yearly worm change. What could Mina possibly want with Sivaraksa?

  She opened the message, read it.

  It was exactly as she had feared, and yet not dared to believe.

  Sivaraksa was responding to Mina’s request to work on the Moat. The tone of the message was conversational, in stark contrast to the businesslike response Naqi had received. Sivaraksa informed her sister that her request had been appraised favourably, and that while there were still one or two other candidates to be considered, the expectation was that Mina would emerge as the most convincing applicant. Even if this turned out not to be the case, Sivaraksa continued – and that outcome was not thought very likely – Mina’s name would be at the top of the list when further vacancies became available. In short, she was more or less guaranteed a chance to work on the Moat within the year.

  Naqi read the message again, just in case there was some highly subtle detail that threw the entire thing into a different, more benign light.

  Then she snapped shut the fan with a sense of profound fury. She placed it back where it was, exactly as it had been.

  Mina pushed her head through the hermetic curtain.

  “How’s it coming along?”

  “Fine. . .” Naqi said. Her voice sounded drained of emotion even to herself.

  “Got that routine cobbled together?”

  “Coming along,” Naqi said.

  “Something the matter?”

  “No . . .” Naqi forced a smile. “No. Just working through the details. Have it ready in a few minutes.”

  “Good. Can’t wait to start the sweep. We’re going to get some beautiful data, sis. And I think this is going to be a significant node. Maybe the largest this season. Aren’t you glad it came our way?”

  “Thrilled,” Naqi said, before returning to her work.

  Thirty specialised probes hung on telemetric cables from the underside of the gondola, dangling like the venom-tipped stingers of some grotesque aerial jellyfish. The probes sniffed the air metres above the Juggler biomass, or skimmed the fuzzy green surface of the formation. Weighted plumb lines penetrated to the sea beneath the raft, sipping the organism-infested depths dozens of metres under the node. Radar mapped larger structures embedded within the node – dense kernels of compacted biomass, or huge cavities and tubes of implacable function – while sonar graphed the topology of the many sinewy organic cables which plunged into darkness, umbilicals anchoring the node to the seabed. Smaller nodes drew most of their energy from sunlight and the breakdown of sugars and fats in the sea’s other floating microorganisms but the larger formations – which had a vastly higher information-processing burden – needed to tap belching aquatic fissures, active rifts in the ocean bed kilometres under the waves. Cold water was pumped down each umbilical by peristaltic compression waves, heated by being circulated in the superheated thermal environment of the underwater volcanoes, and then pumped back to the surface.

  In all this sensing activity, remarkably little physical harm was done to the extended organism itself. The biomass sensed the approach of the probes and rearranged itself so that they passed through with little obstruction, even those scything lines that reached into the water. Energy was obviously being consumed to avoid the organism sustaining damage, and by implication the measurements must therefore have had some effect on the node’s information processing efficiency. The effect was likely to be small, however, and since the node was already subject to constant changes in its architecture – some probably intentional, and some probably forced on it by other factors in its environment – there appeared to be little point in worrying about the harm caused by the human investigators. Ultimately, so much was still guesswork. Although the swimmer teams had learned a great deal about the Pattern Jugglers’ encoded information, almost everything else about them – how and why they stored the neural patterns, and to what extent the patterns were subject to subsequent postprocessing – remained unknown. And those were merely the immediate questions. Beyond that were the real mysteries, which everyone wanted to solve, but were simply beyond the scope of immediate academic study. What they would learn today could not be ex
pected to shed any light on those profundities. A single data point – even a single clutch of measurements – could not usually prove or disprove anything. But nonetheless it might later turn out to play a vital role in some chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.

  It was something she was proud to be part of.

  The spiral sweep continued uneventfully, the airship chugging around in a gently widening circle. Morning shifted to early afternoon, and then the sun began to climb down toward the horizon, bleeding pale orange into the sky through soft-edged cracks in the cloud cover. For hours Naqi and Mina studied the incoming results, the ever-sharper scans of the node appearing on screens throughout the gondola. They discussed the results cordially enough, but Naqi could not stop thinking about Mina’s betrayal. She took a spiteful pleasure in testing the extent to which her sister would lie, deliberately forcing the conversation around to Dr Sivaraksa and the project he steered.

  “I hope I don’t end up like one of those deadwood bureaucrats,” Naqi said, when they were discussing the way their careers might evolve. “You know, like Sivaraksa.” She observed Mina pointedly, yet giving nothing away. “I read some of his old papers; he used to be pretty good once. But now look at him.”

  “It’s easy to say that,” Mina said. “But I bet he doesn’t like being away from the frontline any more than we would. But someone has to manage these big projects. Wouldn’t you rather it was someone who’d at least been a scientist?”

  “You sound like you’re defending him. Next you’ll be telling me you think the Moat is a good idea.”

  “I’m not defending Sivaraksa,” Mina said. “I’m just saying . . .” She eyed her sister with a sudden glimmer of suspicion. Had she guessed that Naqi knew? “Never mind. Sivaraksa can fight his own battles. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Anyone would think you were changing the subject,” Naqi said. But Mina was already on her way out of the gondola to check the equipment again.

  At dusk the airship arrived at the perimeter of the node, completed one orbit, then began to track inward again. As it passed over the parts of the node previously mapped, time-dependent changes were highlighted on the displays: arcs and bands of red superimposed against the lime and turquoise false-colour of the mapped structures. Most of the alterations were minor: a chamber opening here or closing there, or a small alteration in the network topology to ease a bottleneck between the lumpy subnodes dotted around the floating island. Other changes were more mysterious in function, but conformed to types seen in other studies. They were studied at enhanced resolution, the data prioritised and logged.

  It looked as if the node was large but in no way unusual.

  Then night came, as swiftly as it always did at those latitudes. Mina and Naqi took turns sleeping for two or three hour stretches while the other kept an eye on the readouts. During a lull Naqi climbed up onto the top of the airship and tried the antenna again, and for a moment was gladdened when she saw that a new message had arrived. But the message itself turned out to be a statement from the Snowflake Council stating that the blackout on civilian messages would continue for at least another two days, until the current “crisis” was over. There were allusions to civil disturbances in two cities, with curfews being imposed, and imperatives to ignore all unofficial news sources concerning the nature of the approaching ship.

  Naqi wasn’t surprised that there was trouble, though the extent of it took her aback. Her instincts were to believe the government line. The problem – from the government’s point of view – was that nothing was known for certain about the nature of the ship, and so by being truthful they ended up sounding like they were keeping something back. They would have been far better off making up a plausible lie, which could be gently moulded toward accuracy as time passed.

  Mina rose after midnight to begin her shift. Naqi went to sleep and dreamed fitfully, seeing in her mind’s eye red smears and bars hovering against amorphous green. She had been staring at the readouts too intently, for too many hours.

  Mina woke her excitedly before dawn.

  “Now I’m the one with the news,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  Naqi rose from her hammock, neither rested nor enthusiastic. In the dim light of the cabin Mina’s fungal patterns shone with peculiar intensity, abstract detached shapes that only implied her presence.

  Naqi followed the shapes onto the balcony.

  “What,” she said again, not even bothering to make it sound like a question.

  “There’s been a development,” Mina said.

  Naqi rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “With the node?”

  “Look. Down below. Right under us.”

  Naqi pressed her stomach hard against the railing and leaned over as far as she dared. She had felt no real vertigo until they had lowered the sensor lines, and then suddenly there had been a physical connection between the airship and the ground. But was it her imagination or had the airship lowered itself to about half its previous altitude, reeling in the lines at the same time?

  The midnight light was all spectral shades of milky gray. The creased and crumpled landscape of the node reached away into midgray gloom, merging with the slate of the overlying cloud deck. Naqi saw nothing remarkable, other than the surprising closeness of the surface.

  “I mean really look down,” Mina said.

  Naqi pushed herself against the railing more than she had dared before, until she was standing on the very tips of her toes. Only then did she see it. Directly below them was a peculiar circle of darkness, almost as if the airship was casting a distinct shadow beneath itself. It was a circular zone of exposed seawater, like a lagoon enclosed by the greater mass of the node. Steep banks of Juggler biomass, its heart a deep charcoal gray, rimmed the lagoon. Naqi studied it quietly, sensing that her sister might judge her on any remark she made.

  “How did you see it?” she asked eventually.

  “See it?”

  “It can’t be more than twenty metres wide. A dot like that would have hardly shown up on the topographic map.”

  “Naqi, you don’t understand. I didn’t steer us over the hole. It appeared below us, as we were moving. Listen to the motors. We’re still moving. The hole’s shadowing us. It follows us precisely.”

  “Must be reacting to the sensors,” Naqi said.

  “I’ve hauled them in. We’re not trailing anything within thirty metres of the surface. The node’s reacting to us, Naqi – to the presence of the airship. The Jugglers know we’re here, and they’re sending us a signal.”

  “Maybe they are. But it isn’t our job to interpret that signal. We’re just here to take measurements, not to interact with the Jugglers.”

  “So whose job is it?” Mina asked.

  “Do I have to spell it out? Specialists from Umingmaktok.”

  “They won’t get here in time. You know how long nodes last. By the time the blackout’s lifted, by the time the swimmer corps hotshots get here, we’ll be sitting over a green smudge and not much more. This is a significant find, Naqi. It’s the largest node this season and it’s making a deliberate and clear attempt to invite swimmers.”

  She stepped back from the railing. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all night. This isn’t just a large node, Naqi. Something’s happening – that’s why there’s been so much sprite activity. If we don’t swim here, we might miss something unique.”

  “And if we do swim, we’ll be violating every rule in the book. We’re not trained, Mina. Even if we learned something – even if the Jugglers deigned to communicate with us – we’d be ostracised from the entire scientific community.”

  “That would depend on what we learned, wouldn’t it?”


  “Don’t do this, Mina. It isn’t worth it.”

  “We won’t know if it’s worth it or not until we try, will we?” Mina extended a hand. “Look. You’re right in one sense. Chances are pretty good nothing will happen. Normally you have to offer them a gift – a puzzle, or something rich in information. We haven’t got anything like that. What’ll probably happen is we hit the water and there won’t be any kind of biochemical interaction. In which case, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to tell anyone. And if we do learn something, but it isn’t significant – well, we don’t have to tell anyone about that either. Only if we learn something major. Something so big that they’ll have to forget about a minor violation of protocol.”

  “A minor violation . . . ?” Naqi began, almost laughing at Mina’s audacity.

  “The point is, sis, we have a win-win situation here. And it’s been handed to us on a plate.”

  “You could also argue that we’ve been handed a major chance to fuck up spectacularly.”

  “You read it whichever way you like. I know what I see.”

  “It’s too dangerous, Mina. People have died . . .” Naqi looked at Mina’s fungal patterns, enhanced and emphasised by her tattoos. “You flagged high for conformality. Doesn’t that worry you slightly?”

  “Conformality’s just a fairy tale they use to scare children into behaving,” said Mina. “‘Eat all your greens or the sea will swallow you up forever.’ I take it about as seriously as I take the Thule kraken, or the drowning of Arviat. I’m fully aware of the risk.”

  “The Thule kraken is a joke, and Arviat never existed in the first place. But the last time I checked, conformality was an accepted phenomenon.”

  “It’s an accepted research topic. There’s a distinction.”

  “Don’t split hairs . . .” Naqi began.

  Mina gave every indication of not having heard Naqi speak. Her voice was distant, as if she were speaking to herself. It had a lilting, singsong quality. “Too late to even think about it now. But it isn’t long until dawn. I think it’ll still be there at dawn.”