The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  The changes taking place within the Moat had turned the water turbulent, even at the jetty. She hitched the boat to a mooring point and then took the elevator up the side of the wall, preferring to sprint the distance along the top rather than face the climb. By the time she reached the cut the doors were three quarters of the way to closure, and to Naqi’s immense relief the machinery had yet to falter.

  She approached the tower. She had expected to see more people out on the top of the Moat, even if she knew that Sivaraksa would still be in his control centre. But no one was around. This was just beginning to register as a distinct wrongness when Sivaraksa emerged into daylight, stumbling from the door at the foot of the tower.

  For an instant she was on the point of calling his name. Then she realised that he was stumbling because he had been injured – his fingers were scarlet with blood – and that he was trying to get away from someone or something.

  Naqi dropped to the ground behind a stack of construction slabs. Through gaps between the slabs she observed Sivaraksa. He was swatting at something, like a man being chased by a persistent wasp. Something tiny and silver harried him. More than one thing, in fact: a small swarm of them, streaming out the open door. Sivaraksa fell to his knees with a moan, brushing ineffectually at his tormentors. His face was turning red, smeared with his own blood. He slumped on one side.

  Naqi remained frozen with fear.

  A person stepped from the open door.

  The figure was garbed in shades of fire. It was Amesha Crane. For an absurd moment Naqi assumed that the woman was about to spring to Sivaraksa’s assistance. It was something about her demeanour. Naqi found it hard to believe that someone so apparently serene could commit such a violent act.

  But Crane did not step closer to Sivaraksa. She merely extended her arms before her, with her fingers outspread. She sustained the oddly theatrical gesture, the muscles in her neck standing proud and rigid.

  The silver things departed Sivaraksa.

  They swarmed through the air, slowing as they neared Crane. Then, with a startling degree of orchestrated obedience, they slid onto her fingers, locked themselves around her wrists, clasped onto the lobes of her ears.

  Her jewellery had attacked Sivaraksa.

  Crane glanced at the man one last time, spun on her heels and then retreated back into the tower.

  Naqi waited until she was certain the woman was not coming back, then started to emerge from behind the pile of slabs. But Sivaraksa saw her. He said nothing, but his agonised eyes widened enough for Naqi to get the warning. She remained where she was, her heart hammering.

  Nothing happened for another minute.

  Then something moved above, changing the play of light across the surface of the Moat. The Voice of Evening’s shuttle was detaching from the tower, a flicker of white machinery beneath the manta curve of its hull.

  The shuttle loitered above the cut, as if observing the final moment of closure. Naqi heard the huge doors grind shut. Then the shuttle banked, and headed over the circular sea, no more than two hundred metres above the waves. Some distance out it halted and executed a sharp right-angled turn. Then it resumed its flight, moving concentrically around the inner wall.

  Sivaraksa closed his eyes. She thought he might have died, but then he opened them again and made the tiniest of nods. Naqi left her place of hiding. She crossed the open ground to Sivaraksa in a low, crablike stoop.

  She knelt down by him, cradling his head in one hand and holding his own hand with the other. “Jotah . . . What happened?”

  He managed to answer her. “They turned on us. The nineteen other delegates. As soon as . . .” He paused, summoning strength. “As soon as Weir made his move.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Join the club,” he said, managing a smile.

  “I need to get you inside,” she said.

  “Won’t help. Everyone else is dead. Or will be by now. They murdered us all.”

  “No.”

  “Kept me alive until the end. Wanted me to give the orders.” He coughed. Blood spattered her hand.

  “I can still get you . . .”

  “Naqi. Save yourself. Get help.”

  She realised that he was about to die.

  “The shuttle?”

  “Looking for Weir. I think.”

  “They want Weir back?”

  “No. Heard them talking. They want Weir dead. They have to be sure.”

  Naqi frowned. She understood none of this, or, at least, her understanding was only now beginning to crystallise. She had labelled Weir as the villain because he had harmed her beloved Pattern Jugglers. But Crane and her entourage had murdered people, dozens if what Sivaraksa said was correct. They appeared to want Weir dead as well. So what did that make Weir, now?

  “Jotah . . . I have to find Weir. I have to find out why he did this.” She looked back toward the centre of the Moat. The shuttle was continuing its search. “Did your security people get a trace on him again?”

  Sivaraksa was near the end. She thought he was never going to answer her. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, they found him again.”

  “And? Any idea where he is? I might still be able to reach him before the shuttle does.”

  “Wrong place.”

  She leaned closer. “Jotah?”

  “Wrong place. Amesha’s looking in the wrong place. Weir got through the cut. He’s in the open ocean.”

  “I’m going after him. Perhaps I can stop him . . .”

  “Try,” Sivaraksa said. “But I’m not sure what difference it will make. I have a feeling, Naqi. A very bad feeling. Things are ending. It was good, wasn’t it? While it lasted?”

  “I haven’t given up just yet,” Naqi said.

  He found one last nugget of strength. “I knew you wouldn’t. Right to trust you. One thing, Naqi. One thing that might make a difference . . . if it comes to the worst, that is . . .”

  “Jotah?”

  “Tak Thonburi told me this . . . the highest secret known to the Snowflake Council. Arviat, Naqi.”

  For a moment she thought she had misheard him, or that he was sliding into delirium. “Arviat? The city that sinned against the sea?”

  “It was real,” Sivaraksa said.

  There were a number of lifeboats and emergency service craft stored at the top of near-vertical slipways, a hundred metres above the external sea. She took a small but fast emergency craft with a sealed cockpit, her stomach knotting as the vessel commenced its slide toward the ocean. The boat submerged before resurfacing, boosted up to speed and then deployed ceramic hydrofoils to minimise the contact between the hull and the water. Naqi had no precise heading to follow, but she believed. Weir would have followed a reasonably straight line away from the cut, aiming to get as far away from the Moat as possible before the other delegates realised their mistake. It would only require a small deviation from that course to take him to the nearest external node, which seemed as likely a destination as any.

  When she was twenty kilometres from the Moat, Naqi allowed herself a moment to look back. The structure was a thin white line etched on the horizon, the towers and the now-sealed cut faintly visible as interruptions in the line’s smoothness. Quills of dark smoke climbed from a dozen spots along the length of the structure. It was too far for Naqi to be certain that she saw flames licking from the towers, but she considered it likely.

  The closest external node appeared over the horizon fifteen minutes later. It was nowhere as impressive as the one that had taken Mina, but it was still a larger, more complex structure than any of the nodes that had formed within the Moat – a major urban megalopolis, perhaps, rather than a moderately sized city. Against the skyline Naqi saw spires and rotunda and coronets of green, bridged by a tracery of elevated tendrils. Sprites were rapidly moving silhouettes. There was motion, but it was largely confined to the flying creatures. The node was not yet showing the frenzied changes she had witnessed within the Moat.

  Had Weir go
ne somewhere else?

  She pressed onward, slowing the boat slightly now that the water was thickening with microorganisms and it was necessary to steer around the occasional larger floating structure. The boat’s sonar picked out dozens of submerged tendrils converging on the node, suspended just below the surface. The tendrils reached away in all directions, to the limits of the boat’s sonar range. Most would have reached over the horizon, to nodes many hundreds of kilometres away. But it was a topological certainty that some of them had been connected to the nodes inside the Moat. Evidently, Weir’s contagion had never escaped through the cut. Naqi doubted that the doors had closed in time to impede whatever chemical signals were transmitting the fatal message. It was more likely that some latent Juggler self-protection mechanism had cut in, the dying nodes sending emergency termination-of-connection signals that forced the tendrils to sever without human assistance.

  Naqi had just decided that she had guessed wrongly about Weir’s plan when she saw a rectilinear furrow gouged right through one of the largest subsidiary structures. The wound was healing itself as she watched – it would be gone in a matter of minutes – but enough remained for her to tell that Weir’s boat must have cleaved through the mass very recently. It made sense. Weir had already demonstrated that he had no interest in preserving the Pattern Jugglers.

  With renewed determination, Naqi gunned the boat forward. She no longer worried about inflicting local damage on the floating masses. There was a great deal more at stake than the well-being of a single node.

  She felt a warmth on the back of her neck.

  At the same instant the sky, sea and floating structures ahead of her pulsed with a cruel brightness. Her own shadow stretched forward ominously. The brightness faded over the next few seconds, and then she dared to look back, half-knowing what she would see.

  A mass of hot, roiling gas was climbing into the air from the centre of the node. It hugged a column of matter beneath it, like the knotted and gnarled spinal column of a horribly swollen brain. Against the mushroom cloud she saw the tiny moving speck of the delegates’ shuttle.

  A minute later the sound of the explosion reached her, but although it was easily the loudest thing she had ever heard, it was not as deafening as she had expected. The boat lurched; the sea fumed and then was still again. She assumed that the Moat’s wall had absorbed much of the energy of the blast.

  Suddenly fearful that there might be another explosion, Naqi turned back toward the node. At the same instant she saw Weir’s boat, racing perhaps three hundred metres ahead of her. He was beginning to curve and slow as he neared the impassable perimeter of the node. Naqi knew that she did not have time to delay.

  That was when Weir saw her. His boat sped up again, arcing hard away. Naqi steered immediately, certain that her boat was faster and that it was now only a matter of time before she had him. A minute later Weir’s boat disappeared around the curve of the node’s perimeter. She might have stood a chance of getting an echo from his hull, but this close to the node all sonar returns were too garbled to be of any use. Naqi steered anyway, hoping that Weir would make the tactical mistake of striking for another node. In open water he stood no chance at all, but perhaps he understood that as well.

  She had circumnavigated a third of the node’s perimeter when she caught up with him again. He had not tried to run for it. Instead he had brought the boat to a halt within the comparative shelter of an inlet on the perimeter. He was standing up at the rear of the boat, with something small and dark in his hand.

  Naqi slowed her boat as she approached him. She had popped back the canopy before it occurred to her that Weir might be equipped with the same weapons as Crane.

  She stood up herself. “Weir?”

  He smiled. “I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I don’t think it could have happened any other way.”

  She let this pass. “That thing in your hand?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a weapon, isn’t it?”

  She could see it clearly now. It was merely a glass bauble, little larger than a child’s marble. There was something opaque inside it, but she could not tell if it contained fluid or dark crystals.

  “I doubt that a denial would be very plausible at this point.” He nodded, and she sensed the lifting, partially at least, of some appalling burden. “Yes, it’s a weapon. A Juggler killer.”

  “Until today, I’d have said no such thing was possible.”

  “I doubt that it was very easy to synthesize. Countless biological entities have entered their oceans, and none of them have ever brought anything with them that the Juggler couldn’t assimilate in a harmless fashion. Doubtless some of those entities tried to inflict deliberate harm, if only out of morbid curiosity. None of them succeeded. Of course, you can kill Jugglers by brute force . . .” He glanced toward the Moat, where the mushroom cloud was dissipating. “But that isn’t the point. Not subtle. But this is. It exploits a logical flaw in the Jugglers’ own informational processing algorithms. It’s insidious. And no, humans most certainly didn’t invent it. We’re clever, but we’re not that clever.”

  Naqi strove to keep him talking. “Who made it, Weir?”

  “The Ultras sold it to us in a presynthesized form. I’ve heard rumours that it was found inside the topmost chamber of a heavily fortified alien structure . . . Another that it was synthesized by a rival group of Jugglers. Who knows? Who cares, even? It does what we ask of it. That’s all that matters.”

  “Please don’t use it, Rafael.”

  “I have to. It’s what I came here to do.”

  “But I thought you all loved the Jugglers.”

  His fingers caressed the glass globe. It looked terribly fragile. “We?”

  “Crane . . . Her delegates.”

  “They do. But I’m not one of them.”

  “Tell me what this is about, Rafael.”

  “It would be better if you just accepted what I have to do.”

  Naqi swallowed. “If you kill them, you will kill more than just an alien life form. You erase the memory of every sentient creature that’s ever entered the ocean.”

  “Unfortunately, that rather happens to be the point.”

  Weir dropped the glass into the sea.

  It hit the water, bobbed under and then popped back out again, floating on the surface. The small globe was already immersed in a brackish scum of gray-green microorganisms. They were beginning to lap higher up the sides of the globe, exploring it. A couple of millimetres of ordinary glass would succumb to Juggler erosion in perhaps thirty minutes . . . But Naqi guessed that this was not ordinary glass, that it was designed to degrade much more rapidly.

  She jumped back down into her control seat and shot her boat forward. She came alongside Weir’s boat, trapping the globe between the two craft. Taking desperate care not to nudge the hulls together, she stopped her boat and leaned over as far as she could without falling in. Her fingertips brushed the glass. Maddeningly, she could not quite get a grip on it. She made one last valiant effort and it drifted beyond her reach. Now it was out of her range, no matter how hard she stretched. Weir watched impassively.

  Naqi slipped into the water. The layer of Juggler organisms licked her chin and nose, the smell immediate and overwhelming now that she was in such close proximity. Her fear was absolute. It was the first time she had entered the water since Mina’s death.

  She caught the globe, taking hold of it with the exquisite care she might have reserved for a rare bird’s egg.

  Already the glass had the porous texture of pumice.

  She held it up, for Weir to see.

  “I won’t let you do this, Rafael.”

  “I admire your concern.”

  “It’s more than concern. My sister is here. She’s in the ocean. And I won’t let you take her away from me.”

  Weir reached inside a pocket and removed another globe.

  They sped away from the node in Naqi’s boat. The new globe rested in his h
and like a gift. He had not yet dropped it in the sea, although the possibility was only ever an instant away. They were far from any node now, but the globe would be guaranteed to come into contact with Juggler matter sooner or later.

  Naqi opened a watertight equipment locker, pushing aside the flare pistol and first-aid kit that lay within. Carefully she placed the globe inside, and then watched in horror as the glass immediately cracked and dissolved, releasing its poison: little black irregularly shaped grains like burnt sugar. If the boat sank, the locker would eventually be consumed into the ocean, along with its fatal contents. She considered using the flare pistol to incinerate the remains, but there seemed too much danger of dispersing it at the same time. Perhaps the toxin had a restricted life span once it came into contact with air, but that was nothing she could count on.

  But Weir had not thrown the third globe into the sea. Not yet. Something she had said had made him hesitate.

  “Your sister?”

  “You know the story,” Naqi said. “Mina was a conformal. The ocean assimilated her entirely, rather than just recording her neural patterns. It took her as a prize.”

  “And you believe that she’s still present, in some sentient sense?”

  “That’s what I choose to believe, yes. And there’s enough anecdotal evidence from other swimmers that conformals do persist, in a more coherent form than other stored patterns.”

  “I can’t let anecdotal evidence sway me. Naqi. Have the other swimmers specifically reported encounters with Mina?”

  “No . . .” Naqi said carefully. She was sure that he would see through any lie that she attempted. “But they wouldn’t necessarily recognise her if they did.”

  “And you? Did you attempt to swim yourself?”

  “The swimmer corps would never have allowed me.”

  “Not my question. Did you ever swim?”

  “Once,” Naqi said.

  “And?”

  “It didn’t count. It was the same time that Mina died.” She paused and then told him all that had happened. “We were seeing more sprite activity than we’d ever recorded. It seemed like coincidence . . .”