“There it is again.”
The shuttle was a fleck of white sliding over the top of the nearest wall of Juggler biomass. It was five or six kilometres away, much closer than the last time Naqi had seen it. Now it came to a sudden sharp halt, hovering above the surface of the ocean as if it had found something of particular interest.
“Do you think it knows we’re here?”
“It suspects something,” Weir said. The globe rolled between his fingers.
“Look,” Naqi said.
The shuttle was still hovering. Naqi stood up to get a better view, nervous of making herself visible but desperately curious. Something was happening. She knew something was happening.
Kilometres away, the sea was bellying up beneath the shuttle. The water was the colour of moss, supersaturated with microorganisms. Naqi watched as a coil of solid green matter reached from the ocean, twisting and writhing. It was as thick as a building, spilling vast rivulets of water as it emerged. It extended upward with astonishing haste, bifurcating and flexing like a groping fist. For a brief moment it closed around the shuttle. Then it slithered back into the sea with a titanic splash; a prolonged roar of spent energy. The shuttle continued to hover above the same spot, as if oblivious to what had just happened. Yet the manta-shaped craft’s white hull was lathered with various hues of green. And Naqi understood: what had happened to the shuttle was what had happened to Arviat, the city that drowned. She could not begin to guess the crime that Arviat had committed against the sea, the crime that had merited its destruction, but she could believe, now, at least, that the Jugglers had been capable of dragging it beneath the waves, ripping the main mass of the city away from the bladders that held it aloft. And of course such a thing would have to be kept maximally secret, known only to a handful of individuals. Otherwise no city would ever feel safe when the sea roiled and groaned beneath it.
But a city was not a shuttle.
Even if the Juggler material started eating away the fabric of the shuttle, it would still take hours to do any serious damage . . . And that was assuming the Ultras had no better protection than the ceramic shielding used on Turquoise boats and machines . . .
But the shuttle was already tilting over.
Naqi watched it pitch, attempt to regain stability and then pitch again. She understood, belatedly. The organic matter was clogging the shuttle’s whisking propulsion systems, limiting its ability to hover. The shuttle was curving inexorably closer to the sea, spiralling steeply away from the node. It approached the surface, and then just before the moment of impact another misshapen fist of organised matter thrust from the sea, seizing the hull in its entirety. That was the last Naqi saw of it.
A troubled calm fell on the scene. The sky overhead was unmarred by questing machinery. Only the thin whisper of smoke rising from the horizon, in the direction of the Moat, hinted of the day’s events.
Minutes passed, and then tens of minutes. Then a rapid series of bright flashes strobed from beneath the surface of the sea itself.
“That was the shuttle,” Weir said, wonderingly.
Naqi nodded. “The Jugglers are fighting back. This is more or less what I hoped would happen.”
“You asked for this?”
“I think Mina understood what was needed. Evidently she managed to convince the rest of the ocean, or at least this part of it.”
“Let’s see.”
They searched the airwaves again. The comsat network was dead, or silent. Even fewer cities were transmitting now. But those that were – those that had not been overrun by Ormazd’s disciples – told a frightening story. The ocean was clawing at them, trying to drag them into the sea. Weather patterns were shifting, entire storms being conjured into existence by the orchestrated circulation of vast ocean currents. It was happening in concentric waves, racing away from the precise point in the ocean where Naqi had swum. Some cities had already fallen into the sea, though it was not clear whether this had been brought about by the Jugglers themselves or because of damage to their vacuum bladders. There were people in the water: hundreds, thousands of them. They were swimming, trying to stay afloat, trying not to drown.
But what exactly did it mean to drown on Turquoise?
“It’s happening all over the planet,” Naqi said. She was still shivering, but now it was as much a shiver of awe as one of cold. “It’s denying itself to us by smashing our cities.”
“Your cities never harmed it.”
“I don’t think it’s really that interested in making a distinction between one bunch of people and another, Rafael. It’s just getting rid of us all, disciples or not. You can’t really blame it for that, can you?”
“I’m sorry,” Weir said.
He cracked the globe, spilled its contents into the sea.
Naqi knew there was nothing she could do now; there was no prospect of recovering the tiny black grains. She would only have to miss one, and it would be as bad as missing them all.
The little black grains vanished beneath the olive surface of the water.
It was done.
Weir looked at her, his eyes desperate for forgiveness.
“You understand that I had to do this, don’t you? It isn’t something I do lightly.”
“I know. But it wasn’t necessary. The ocean’s already turned against us. Crane has lost. Ormazd has lost.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Weir said. “But I couldn’t take the chance that we might be wrong. At least this way I know for sure.”
“You’ve murdered a world.”
He nodded. “It’s exactly what I came here to do. Please don’t blame me for it.”
Naqi opened the equipment locker where she had stowed the broken vial of Juggler toxin. She removed the flare pistol, snatched away its safety pin and pointed it at Weir.
“I don’t blame you, no. Don’t even hate you for it.”
He started to say something, but Naqi cut him off.
“But it’s not something I can forgive.”
She sat in silence, alone, until the node became active. The organic structures around her were beginning to show the same kinds of frantic rearrangement Naqi had seen within the Moat. There was a cold sharp breeze from the node’s heart.
It was time to leave.
She steered the boat away from the node, cautiously, still not completely convinced that she was safe from the delegates even though the first shuttle had been destroyed. Undoubtedly the loss of that craft would have been communicated to the others, and before very long some of them would arrive, bristling with belligerence. The ocean might attempt to destroy the new arrivals, but this time the delegates would be profoundly suspicious.
She brought the boat to a halt when she was a kilometre from the fringe of the node. By then it was running through the same crazed alterations she had previously witnessed. She felt the same howling wind of change. In a moment the end would come. The toxin would seep into the node’s controlling core, instructing the entire biomass to degrade itself to a lump of dumb vegetable matter. The same killing instructions would already be travelling along the internode tendril connections, winging their way over the horizon. Allowing for the topology of the network, it would only take fifteen or twenty hours for the message to reach every node on the planet. Within a day it would be over. The Jugglers would be gone, the information they’d encoded erased beyond recall. And Turquoise itself would begin to die at the same time; its oxygen atmosphere no longer maintained by the oceanic organisms.
Another five minutes passed, then ten.
The node’s transformations were growing less hectic. She recalled this moment of false calm. It meant only that the node had given up trying to counteract the toxin, accepting the logical inevitability of its fate. A thousand times over this would be repeated around Turquoise. Toward the end, she guessed, there would be less resistance, for the sheer futility of it would have been obvious. The world would accept its fate.
Another five minutes passed.
; The node remained. The structures were changing, but only gently. There was no sign of the emerging mound of undifferentiated matter she had seen before.
What was happening?
She waited another quarter of an hour and then steered the boat back toward the node, bumping past Weir’s floating corpse on the way. Tentatively, an idea was forming in her mind. It appeared that the node had absorbed the toxin without dying. Was it possible that Weir had made a mistake? Was it possible that the toxin’s effectiveness depended only on it being used once?
Perhaps.
There still had to be tendril connections between the Moat and the rest of the ocean at the time that the first wave of transformations had taken place. They had been severed later – either when the doors closed, or by some autonomic process within the extended organism itself – but until that moment, there would still have been informational links with the wider network of nodes. Could the dying nodes have sent sufficient warning that the other nodes were now able to find a strategy for protecting themselves?
Again, perhaps.
It never paid to take anything for granted where the Jugglers were concerned.
She parked the boat by the node’s periphery. Naqi stood up and removed her clothes for the final time, certain that she would not need them again. She looked down at herself, astonished at the vivid tracery of green that now covered her body. On one level, the evidence of alien cellular invasion was quite horrific.
On another, it was startlingly beautiful.
Smoke licked from the horizon. Machines clawed through the sky, hunting nervously. She stepped to the edge of the boat, tensing herself at the moment of commitment. Her fear subsided, replaced by an intense, loving calm. She stood on the threshold of something alien, but in place of terror what she felt was only an imminent sense of homecoming. Mina was waiting for her below. Together nothing could stop them.
Naqi smiled, spread her arms and returned to the sea.
Table of Contents
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 107
