The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  She pushed past Naqi.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “To catch some sleep. I need to be fresh for this. So will you.”

  They hit the lagoon with two gentle, anticlimactic splashes. Naqi was underwater for a moment before she bobbed to the surface, holding her breath. At first she had to make a conscious effort to start breathing again: the air immediately above the water was so saturated with microscopic organisms that choking seemed a real possibility. Mina, surfacing next to her, drew in gulps with wild enthusiasm, as if willing the tiny creatures to invade her lungs. She shrieked delight at the sudden cold. When they had both gained equilibrium, treading with their shoulders above water, Naqi was finally able to take stock. She saw everything through a stinging haze of tears. The gondola hovered above them, poised beneath the larger mass of the vacuum bladder. The life raft that it had deployed was sparkling new, rated for one hundred hours against moderate biological attack. But that was for mid-ocean, where the density of Juggler organisms would be much less than in the middle of a major node. Here, the hull might only endure a few tens of hours before it was consumed.

  Once again, Naqi wondered if she should withdraw. There was still time. No real damage had yet been done. She could be back in the boat and back aboard the airship in a minute or so. Mina might not follow her, but she did not have to be complicit in her sister’s actions. But Naqi knew she would not be able to turn back. She could not show weakness now that she had come this far.

  “Nothing’s happening . . .” she said.

  “We’ve only been in the water a minute,” Mina said.

  The two of them wore black wetsuits. The suits themselves could become buoyant if necessary – all it would take would be the right sequence of tactile commands and dozens of tiny bladders would inflate around the chest and shoulder area – but it was easy enough to tread water. In any case, if the Jugglers initiated contact the suits would probably be eaten away in minutes. The swimmers who had made repeated contact often swam naked or near naked, but Naqi was not prepared for that level of abject surrender to the ocean’s assault. Nor was Mina.

  After another minute the water no longer seemed as cold. Through gaps in the cloud cover the sun was harsh on Naqi’s cheek. It etched furiously bright lines in the bottle-green surface of the lagoon, lines that coiled and shifted into fleeting calligraphic shapes as if conveying secret messages. The calm water lapped gently against their upper bodies. The walls of the lagoon were metre-high masses of fuzzy vegetation, like the steep banks of a river. Now and then Naqi felt something brush gently against her feet, like a passing frond or strand of seaweed. The first few times she flinched at the contact, but after a while it became strangely soothing. Occasionally something stroked one or other hand, then moved playfully away. When she lifted her hands from the sea, mats of gossamer green draped from her fingers like the tattered remains of expensive gloves. The green material slithered free and slipped back into the sea. It tickled between her fingers.

  “Nothing’s still happened,” Naqi said, more quietly this time.

  “You’re wrong. The shoreline’s moved closer.”

  Naqi looked at it. “It’s a trick of perspective.”

  “I assure you it isn’t.”

  Naqi looked back at the raft. They had drifted five or six metres from it. It might as well have been a kilometre for all the sense of security that the raft now offered. Mina was right: the lagoon was closing in on them, gently, slowly. If the lagoon had been twenty metres wide when they had entered it must now be a third smaller. There was still time to escape before the hazy green walls squeezed in on them, but only if they moved now, back to the raft, back into the safety of the gondola.

  “Mina . . . I want to go. We’re not ready for this.”

  “We don’t need to be ready. It’s going to happen.”

  “We’re not trained!”

  “Call it learning on the job, in that case.” Mina was still trying to sound outrageously calm, but it wasn’t working. Naqi heard the flaw in her voice. She was either terribly frightened or terribly excited.

  “You’re more scared than I am,” she said.

  “I am scared,” said Mina. “Scared we’ll screw this up. Scared we’ll blow this opportunity. Understand? I’m that kind of scared.”

  Either Naqi was treading water less calmly, or the water itself had become visibly more agitated in the last few moments. The green walls were perhaps ten metres apart, and now were not quite the sheer vertical structures they had appeared before. They had taken on form and design, growing and complexifying by the second. It was akin to watching a distant city emerge from fog, the revealing of bewildering, plunging layers of mesmeric detail, more than the eye or the mind could process.

  “It doesn’t look as if they’re expecting a gift this time,” Mina said.

  Veined tubes and pipes coiled and writhed around each other in constant sinuous motion, making Naqi think of some hugely magnified circuitry formed from plant parts. It was restless living circuitry that never quite settled into one configuration. Now and then chequer-board designs appeared, or intricately interlocking runes. Sharply geometric patterns flickered from point to point, echoed, amplified and subtly iterated at each move. Distinct three-dimensional shapes assumed brief solidity, carved from greenery as if by the deft hand of a topiarist. Naqi glimpsed unsettling anatomies; the warped memories of alien bodies that had once entered the ocean, a million or a billion years ago. Here a three-jointed limb, here the shieldlike curve of an exoskeletal plaque. The head of something that was almost equine melted into a goggling mass of faceted eyes. Fleetingly, a human form danced from the chaos. But only once. Alien swimmers outnumbered human swimmers vastly.

  Here were the Pattern Jugglers, Naqi knew. The first explorers had mistaken these remembered forms for indications of actual sentience, thinking that the oceanic mass was a kind of community of intelligences. It was an easy mistake to have made, but it was some way from the truth. These animate shapes were enticements, like the gaudy covers of books. The minds themselves were captured only as frozen traces. The only living intelligence within the ocean lay in its own curatorial system.

  To believe anything else was heresy.

  The dance of bodies became too rapid to follow. Pastel-coloured lights glowed from deep within the green structure, flickering and stuttering. Naqi thought of lanterns burning from the depths of a forest. Now the edge of the lagoon had become irregular, extending peninsulas toward the centre of the dwindling circle of water, while narrow bays and inlets fissured back into the larger mass of the node. The peninsulas sprouted grasping tendrils, thigh-thick at the trunk but narrowing to the dimensions of plant fronds, and then narrowing further, bifurcating into lacy, fernlike hazes of awesome complexity. They diffracted light like the wings of dragonflies. They were closing over the lagoon, forming a shimmering canopy. Now and then a sprite – or something smaller but equally bright – arced from one bank of the lagoon to another. Brighter things moved through the water like questing fish. Microscopic organisms were detaching from the larger fronds and tendrils, swarming in purposeful clouds. They batted against her skin, against her eyelids. Every breath that she took made her cough. The taste of the Pattern Jugglers was sour and medicinal. They were in her, invading her body.

  She panicked. It was as if a tiny switch had flipped in her mind. Suddenly all other concerns melted away. She had to get out of the lagoon immediately, no matter what Mina would think of her.

  Thrashing more than swimming, Naqi tried to push herself toward the raft. But as soon as the panic reaction had kicked in she had felt something else slide over her. It was not so much paralysis as an immense sense of inertia. Moving, even breathing, became problematic. The boat was impossibly distant. She was no longer capable of treading water. She felt heavy, and when she looked down she saw that a green haze enveloped the parts of her body that she could see above water. The organisms were adhering to the fabric of her wetsuit.r />
  “Mina . . .” she called. “Mina!”

  But Mina only looked at her. Naqi sensed that her sister was experiencing the same sort of paralysis. Mina’s movements had become languid, and yet instead of panic what Naqi saw on her face was profound resignation and acceptance. It was dangerously close to serenity.

  Mina wasn’t frightened at all.

  The patterns on her neck were flaring vividly. Her eyes were closed. Already the organisms had begun to attack the fabric of her suit, stripping it away from her flesh. Naqi could feel the same thing happening to her own suit. There was no pain, for the organisms stopped short of attacking her skin. With a mighty effort she hoisted her forearm from the water, studying the juxtaposition of pale flesh and dissolving black fabric. Her fingers were as stiff as iron.

  But – and Naqi clung to this – the ocean recognised the sanctity of organisms, or at least thinking organisms. Strange things might happen to people who swam with the Jugglers, things that might be difficult to distinguish from death or near death. But people always emerged afterward, changed perhaps, but essentially whole. No matter what happened now, they would survive. The Jugglers always returned those who swam with them, and even when they did effect changes they were seldom permanent.

  Except, of course, for those who didn’t return.

  No, Naqi told herself. What they were doing was foolish, and might perhaps destroy their careers. But they would survive. Mina had flagged high on the conformality index when she had applied to join the swimmer corps, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily at risk. Conformality merely implied a rare connection with the ocean. It verged on the glamorous.

  Now Mina was going under. She had stopped moving entirely. Her eyes were blankly ecstatic.

  Naqi wanted to resist that same impulse to submission. But the strength had flown away from her. She felt herself commence the same descent. The water closed over her mouth, then her eyes, and in a moment she was under. She felt herself a toppled statue sliding toward the seabed. Her fear reached a crescendo and then passed. She was not drowning. The froth of green organisms had forced itself down her throat, down her nasal passage. She felt no fright. There was nothing except a profound feeling that this was what she had been born to do.

  Naqi knew what was happening, what was going to happen. She had studied enough reports on swimmer missions. The tiny organisms were infiltrating her entire body, creeping into her lungs and bloodstream. They were keeping her alive, while at the same time flooding her with chemical bliss. Droves of the same tiny creatures were seeking routes to her brain, inching along the optic nerve, the aural nerve, or crossing the blood-brain barrier itself. They were laying tiny threads behind them, fibres that extended back into the larger mass of organisms suspended in the water around her. In turn, these organisms established data-carrying channels back into the primary mass of the node . . . And the node itself was connected to other nodes, both chemically and via the packet-carrying sprites. The green threads bound Naqi to the entire ocean. It might take hours for a signal to reach her mind from halfway around Turquoise, but it didn’t matter. She was beginning to think on Juggler time, her own thought processes seeming pointlessly quick, like the motion of bees.

  She sensed herself becoming vaster.

  She was no longer just a pale, hard-edged thing labelled Naqi, suspended in the lagoon like a dying starfish. Her sense of self was rushing out toward the horizon in all directions, encompassing first the node and then the empty oceanic waters around it. She couldn’t say precisely how this information was reaching her. It wasn’t through visual imagery, but more an intensely detailed spatial awareness. It was as if spatial awareness had suddenly become her most vital sense.

  She supposed this was what swimmers meant when they spoke of kenning.

  She kenned the presence of other nodes over the horizon, their chemical signals flooding her mind, each unique, each bewilderingly rich in information. It was like hearing the roar of a hundred crowds. And at the same time she kenned the ocean depths, the cold fathoms of water beneath the node, the life-giving warmth of the crustal vents. Closer, too, she kenned Mina. They were two neighbouring galaxies in a sea of strangeness. Mina’s own thoughts were bleeding into the sea, into Naqi’s mind, and in them Naqi felt the reflected echo of her own thoughts, picked up by Mina . . .

  It was glorious.

  For a moment their minds orbited each other, kenning each other on a level of intimacy neither had dreamed possible.

  Mina . . . Can you feel me?

  I’m here, Naqi. Isn’t this wonderful?

  The fear was gone, utterly. In its place was a marvellous feeling of immanence. They had made the right decision, Naqi knew. She had been right to follow Mina. Mina was deliriously happy, basking in the same hopeful sense of security and promise.

  And then they began to sense other minds.

  Nothing had changed, but it was suddenly clear that the roaring signals from the other nodes were composed of countless individual voices, countless individual streams of chemical information. Each stream was the recording of a mind that had entered the ocean at some point. The oldest minds – those that had entered the ocean in the deep past – were the faintest ones, but they were also the most numerous. They had begun to sound alike, the shapes of their stored personalities blurring into each other, no matter how alien they had been to start with. The minds that had been captured more recently were sharper and more variegated, like oddly shaped pebbles on a beach. Naqi kenned brutal alienness, baroque architectures of mind shaped by outlandish chains of evolutionary contingency. The only thing any of them had in common was that they had all reached a certain threshold of tool-using intelligence, and had all – for one reason or another – been driven into interstellar space, where they had encountered the Pattern Jugglers. But that was like saying the minds of sharks and leopards were alike because they had both evolved to hunt. The differences between the minds were so cosmically vast that Naqi felt her own mental processes struggling to accommodate them.

  Even that was becoming easier. Subtly – slowly enough that from moment to moment she was not aware of it – the organisms in her skull were retuning her neural connections, and allowing more and more of her consciousness to seep out into the extended processing loom of the sea.

  She sensed the most recent arrivals.

  They were all human minds, each a glittering gem of distinctness. Naqi sensed a great gulf in time between the earliest human mind and the last recognisably alien one. She had no idea if it was a million or a billion years, but it felt immense. At the same time she grasped that the ocean had been desperate for newness, and that while these human minds were welcome, they were barely sufficient.

  The minds were snapshots, frozen in the conception of a single thought. It was like an orchestra of instruments, all sustaining a single unique note. Perhaps there was a grindingly slow evolution in those minds – she sensed the merest subliminal hint of change – but if that was the case it would take centuries to complete a thought . . . thousands of years to complete the simplest internalised statement. The newest minds might not even have come to the realisation that they had been swallowed by the sea.

  Yet now Naqi sensed a single mind flaring louder than the others.

  It was recent and human, and yet there was something about it that struck her as discordant. The mind was damaged, as if it had been captured imperfectly. It was disfigured, giving off squalls of hurt. It had suffered dreadfully. It was reaching out to her, craving love and affection; something to cling to in the abyssal loneliness it now knew.

  Images ghosted through her mind. Something was burning. Flames licked through the interstitial gaps in a great black structure. She couldn’t tell if it was a building or a vast, pyramidal bonfire.

  She heard screams, and then something hysterical, which she at first took for more screaming, until she realised that it was something far, far worse. It was laughter, and as the flames roared higher, consuming the mass, smo
thering the screams, the laughter only intensified.

  She thought it might be the laughter of a child.

  Perhaps it was her imagination, but this mind appeared more fluid than the others. Its thoughts were still slow – far slower than Naqi’s – but the mind appeared to have usurped more than its share of processing resources. It was stealing computational cycles from neighbouring minds, freezing them into absolute stasis while it completed a single sluggish thought.

  The mind worried Naqi. Pain and fury was boiling off it.

  Mina kenned it too. Naqi tasted Mina’s thoughts and knew that her sister was equally disturbed by the mind’s presence. Then she felt the mind’s attention shift, drawn to the two inquisitive minds that had just entered the sea. It became aware of both of them, quietly watchful. A moment or two passed, and then the mind slipped away, back to wherever it had come from.

  What was that . . .

  She felt her sister’s reply. I don’t know. A human mind. A conformal, I think. Someone who was swallowed by the sea. But it’s gone now.

  No, it hasn’t. It’s still there. Just hiding.

  Millions of minds have entered the sea, Naqi. Thousands of conformals, perhaps, if you think of all the aliens that came before us. There are bound to be one or two bad apples.

  That wasn’t just a bad apple. It was like touching ice. And it sensed us. It reacted to us. Didn’t it?

  She sensed Mina’s hesitation.

  We can’t be sure. Our own perceptions of events aren’t necessarily reliable. I can’t even be certain we’re having this conversation. I might be talking to myself . . .

  Mina . . . Don’t talk like that. I don’t feel safe.

  Me neither. But I’m not going to let one frightening thing unnecessarily affect me.

  Something happened then. It was a loosening, a feeling that the ocean’s grip on Naqi had just relented to a significant degree. Mina, and the roaring background of other minds, fell away to something much more distant. It was as if Naqi had just stepped out of a babbling party into a quiet adjacent room, and was even now moving farther and farther away from the door.