Very well. Secondly, Parker Higgens requests you visit him today, as soon as possible, in fact. He was rather insistent.
Why?
I believe the team analysing Joshua’s Laymil electronics stack have made a breakthrough.
* * *
Pernik’s fishing boats were halfway to the horizon by the time Syrinx emerged from the base of the tower on the morning she was due to visit the whales. The cool dawn sun had coloured the island’s covering of moss a matt black. She breathed in the salty air, relishing the cleanliness.
I never really thought of our air as anything exceptional, Mosul said. He was walking beside her, holding a big box full of supplies for the voyage.
It isn’t once the humidity gets up. But don’t forget, over ninety per cent of my life is spent in a perfectly regulated environment. This is an exhilarating change.
Oh, thank you! Oenone said tartly.
Syrinx grinned.
We’re in luck, Mosul said. I’ve checked with the dolphins, and the whales are actually closer today. We should be there by late afternoon.
Great.
Mosul led her along the broad avenue down to the rim quays. Water slapped lazily against the polyp. Pernik could have been a genuine island rooted in the planet’s crust for all the motion it made.
Sometimes a real storm rocks us a degree or so.
Ah, right. Her grin faded. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was leaking so much. It’s very rude of me. Preoccupied, I guess.
No problem. Do you want Ruben to come with us? Perhaps he would make you feel easier.
Syrinx thought of him curled up in the bed where she’d left him half an hour ago. There was no response to her halfhearted query. He had gone back to sleep. No. I’m never alone, I have Oenone.
She watched a frown form on Mosul’s handsome sea-browned face. How old is Ruben? the semi-apologetic thought came.
She told him and had to stifle a laugh as the surprise and faint disapproval spilled out of his mind despite a frantic effort to cover them up. Gets them every time.
You shouldn’t tease people so, Oenone said. He’s a nice young man, I like him.
You always say that.
I only voice what you feel.
The quay was balanced on big cylindrical flotation drums which rode the swell in long undulations. Thick purple-red tubes ran along the edge, carrying nutrient fluid out to the boats. Leaky couplings dribbled the dark syrupy fluid into the water.
Syrinx stood to one side as a couple of servitor chimps carrying boxes passed by. They were wildly different from the standard habitat housechimps, with a scaled reptilian skin a mild blue-green in colour. Their feet were broad, with long webbed toes.
The boat that waited for them was called the Spiros, a seventeen-metre sailing craft with a white composite hull. Bitek units were blended into the structure with a skill that went far beyond mechanical practicality, it was almost artistry. The digestive organs and nutrient-reserve bladders were in the bilges, supporting the sub-sentient processor array and the mainsail membrane, as well as various ancillary systems. Her cabin fittings were all wooden, the timber coming from trees grown in the island’s central park. She was used by Mosul’s whole family for recreation. Which explained why the cabin was in a bit of a mess when they came on board.
Mosul stood in the galley clutching his box of supplies and looking round darkly at the discarded wrappers, unwashed pans, and crusty stains on the work surface. He muttered under his breath. My younger cousins had her out a couple of days ago, he apologized.
Well, don’t be too hard on them, youth is a time to be treasured.
They’re not that young. And it’s not as though they couldn’t have detailed a housechimp to clean up afterwards. No damn thought for others. There were more curses when he went forward and found the bunks in the same state.
Syrinx overheard a furious affinity conversation with the juvenile offenders. Smiling to herself she started stowing supplies.
Mosul unplugged the quay’s nutrient-feed veins from their couplings on the Spiros’s aft deck, then cast off. Leaning over the taffrail Syrinx watched the five-metre-long silver-grey eel-derived tail wriggling energetically just below the surface, nudging the boat away from the quay. The tightly whorled sail membrane began to unfurl from its twenty-metre-high mast. When it was fully open it was a triangle the colour of spring-fresh beech leaves, reinforced with a rubbery hexagonal web of muscle cells.
It caught the morning breeze, filling out. A small white wake arose, curling around the bow. The tail straightened out, giving just the occasional tempestuous flick to maintain the course Mosul had loaded into the processor array.
Syrinx made her way forward carefully. The decking was damp below her rubber-soled plimsolls, and they had already picked up a surprising turn of speed. She leaned contentedly on the rail, letting the wind bathe her face. Mosul came up and put his arm round her shoulder.
You know, I think I’m finding this ocean more daunting than space, Syrinx said as Pernik fell astern rapidly. I know space is infinite, and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but Atlantis looks infinite. Thousands of kilometres of empty ocean conjures up a more readily accessible concept for the human mind than all those light-years.
To your mind, Mosul said. I was born here, to me it doesn’t seem infinite at all, I could never be lost. But space, that’s something else. In space you can set out in a straight line and never return. That’s scary.
They spent the morning talking, exchanging the memories of particularly intense or moving or treasured incidents from their respective lives. Syrinx found herself feeling slightly envious of his simplistic life of fishing and sailing, realizing that was the instinctive attraction she had felt at their first meeting. Mosul was so wonderfully uncomplicated. In turn he was almost in awe of her sophistication, the worlds she’d seen, people she’d met, the arduous naval duty.
Once the sun had risen high enough to be felt on her skin, Syrinx stripped off and rubbed on a healthy dose of screening cream.
That’s another difference, she said as Mosul ran his hands over her back, between her shoulder blades where she couldn’t reach. Look at the contrast, I’m like an albino compared to you.
I like it, he told her. All the girls here are coffee coloured or darker, how are we supposed to tell if we’re African-ethnic or not?
She sighed and stretched out on a towel on the cabin’s roof, forward of the sail membrane. It doesn’t matter. All our ethnic ancestors disowned us long ago.
There’s a lot of resentment in that thought. I don’t know why. The Adamists we get here are pleasant enough.
Of course they are, they want your foodstuffs.
And we want their money.
The sail creaked and fluttered gently as the day wore on. Syrinx found the rhythm of the boat lulling her, and coupled with the warmth of the sun she almost went to sleep.
I can see you, Oenone whispered on that unique section of affinity which was theirs alone.
Without conscious thought she knew its orbit was taking it over the Spiros. She opened her eyes and looked into boundless azure sky. My eyes aren’t as good as your sensor blisters. Sorry.
I like seeing you. It doesn’t happen often.
She waved inanely. And behind the velvet blueness she saw herself prone on the little ship, waving. The boat dropped away, becoming a speck, then vanishing. Both universes were solid blue.
Hurry back, Oenone said. I’m crippled this close to a planet.
I will. Soon, I promise.
They sighted the whales that afternoon.
Black mountains were leaping out of the water. Syrinx saw them in the distance. Huge curved bodies sliding out of the waves in defiance of gravity, crashing down amid breakers of boiling surf. Fountain plumes of vapour rocketing into the sky from their blow-holes.
Syrinx couldn’t help it, she jumped up and down on the deck, pointing. “Look, look!”
I see them, Mosul said, amusement and a strange prid
e mingling in his thoughts. They are blue whales, a big school, I reckon there’s about a hundred or more.
Can you see? Syrinx demanded.
I can see, Oenone reassured her. I can feel too. You are happy. I am happy. The whales look happy too, they are smiling.
Yes! Syrinx laughed. Their mouths were upturned, smiling. A perpetual smile. And why not? Such creatures’ existing was cause to smile.
Mosul angled Spiros in closer, ordering the edges of the sail to furl. The noise of the school rolled over the boat. The smack of those huge bodies as they jumped and splashed, a deep gullet-shaking whistle from the blow-holes. She tried to work out how big they were as the Spiros approached the school’s fringes. Some, the big adult bulls, must have been thirty metres long.
A calf came swimming over to the Spiros; over ten metres long, spurting from his blow-hole. His mother followed him closely, the two of them bumping together and sliding against each other. Huge forked tails churned up and down, flukes slapping the water, while flippers beat like shrunken wings. Syrinx watched in utter fascination as the two passed within fifty metres of the boat, rocking it alarmingly in their pounding wake. But she hardly noticed the pitching, the calf was feeding, suckling from its mother as she rolled onto her side.
“That is the most stupendous, miraculous sight,” she said, spellbound. Her hands were gripping the rail, knuckles whitening. “And they’re not even xenocs. They’re ours. Earth’s.”
“Not any more.” Mosul was at her side, as mesmerized as she.
Thank Providence we had the sense to preserve the genes. Although I’m still staggered the Confederation Assembly allowed you to bring them here.
The whales don’t interfere with the food chain, they stand outside it. This ocean can easily spare a million tonnes of krill a day. And nothing analogous could ever possibly evolve on Atlantis, so they’re not competing with anything. The whales are mammals, after all, they need land for part of their development. No, the largest thing Atlantis has produced is the redshark, and that’s only six metres long.
Syrinx curled her arm round his, and pressed against him. I meant, it’s pretty staggering for the Assembly to show this much common sense. It would have been a monumental crime to allow these creatures to die out.
What a cynical old soul you are.
She kissed him lightly. A foretaste of what’s to come. Then rested her head against him, and returned her entire attention to the whales, gathering up every nuance and committing it lovingly to memory.
They followed the school for the rest of the afternoon as the giant animals played and wallowed in the ocean. Then when dusk fell, Mosul turned the Spiros’s bow away. The last she saw of the school was their massive dark bodies arching gracefully against the golden red skyline, whilst the roar of the blow-holes faded away into the ocean’s swell.
That night twisters of phosphenic radiance wriggled through the water around the hull, casting a wan diamond-blue light over the half-reefed sail membrane. Syrinx and Mosul brought cushions out onto the deck, and made love under the stars. Several times Oenone gazed down on their entwined bodies, its presence contributing to the wondrous sense of fulfilment in Syrinx’s mind. She didn’t tell Mosul.
The Laymil project’s Electronics Division was housed in a three-storey octagonal building near the middle of the campus. The walls were a soft white polyp with large oval windows, and climbing hydrangeas had reached the bottom of the second-storey windows. Chuantawa trees from Raouil were planted around the outside, forty-metre-high specimens, their rubbery bark and long tongue-shaped leaves a bright purple, clusters of bronze berries dangling from every branch.
Ione walked towards it down the amaranthus-lined path from the nearest of the campus’s five tube stations, three serjeant bodyguards in tow. Her hair was still slightly damp from her swim with Haile, and the ends brushed against the collar of her formal green-silk suit jacket. She drew wide-eyed stares and cautious smiles from the few project staff wandering around the campus.
Parker Higgens was waiting just outside the main entrance, dressed as ever in his hazel-coloured suit with red spirals on the flared arms. The trousers were fashionably baggy, but he was filling out the jacket quite comfortably. His mop of white hair hung down over his forehead in some disarray.
Ione forbade a smile as they shook hands. The director was always so nervous around her. He was good at his job, but they certainly didn’t share the same sense of humour. He would think teasing was a personal insult.
She greeted Oski Katsura, the head of the Electronics Division. She had taken over from the former head six months ago; her appointment had been the first Ione had confirmed. A seventy-year-old, taller than Ione, with a distinguished willowy beauty, wearing an ordinary white lab smock.
“You have some good news for me, then?” Ione asked as they went inside and started walking down the central corridor.
“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.
“Most of the stack’s circuitry was composed of memory crystals,” Oski Katsura said. “The processors were subsidiary elements to facilitate access and recording. Basically it was a memory core.”
“I see. And had the ice preserved it like we hoped?” Ione asked. “It looked intact when I saw it.”
“Oh, yes. It was almost completely intact, the chips and crystals encased in ice functioned perfectly after they had been removed and cleaned. The reason it has taken us so long to decrypt the data stored in the crystals is that it is non-standard.” They came to a set of wide double doors, and Oski Katsura datavised a security code to open them, gesturing Ione through.
The Electronics Division always reminded her of a cyberfactory: rows of identical clean rooms illuminated by harsh white lighting, all of them filled with enigmatic blocks of equipment trailing wires and cables everywhere. This room was no different, broad benches ran round the walls, with another down the centre, cluttered with customized electronics cabinets and test rigs. The far end was a glass wall partitioning off six workshop cubicles. Several researchers were inside, using robot precision-assembly cells to fabricate various units. At the opposite end of the room to the cubicles a stainless steel pedestal sat on the floor, supporting a big sphere made up of tough transparent composite. Thick environmental-support hoses snaked away from the lower quarter of the sphere, plugging into bulky conditioning units. Ione saw the Laymil electronics stack in the middle of the sphere, with power leads and fibre-optic cables radiating out of its base. More surprisingly, Lieria was standing in front of the long bench in the middle of the room, her tractamorphic arms branching into five or six tentacles apiece, all of which were wound through an electronics cabinet.
Ione was quite proud she could recognize the Kiint immediately. Good morning, Lieria, I thought you worked in the Physiology Division.
The tentacle appendages uncoiled from the cabinet, flowing back into one solid pillar of flesh again. Lieria turned ponderously, careful not to knock into anything. Welcome, Ione Saldana. I am here because Oski Katsura requested my input in this programme. I have been able to contribute to the analysis of data stored in the Laymil crystals; there is some crossover into my primary field of study.
Excellent.
I note your cranial hair carries a residue of salt water; have you been swimming?
Yes, I gave Haile a scrub down. She’s getting impatient to look around Tranquillity. You’ll have to let me know when you think she’s ready.
Your kindness is most welcome. We judge her mature enough to be allowed outside parental restriction providing she is accompanied. But do not permit her to impose upon your own time.
She’s no bother.
One of Lieria’s arms lengthened to pick up a slender white wafer ten centimetres square from the bench. The unit emitted a single whistle, then spoke. “Greetings, Director Parker Higgens.”
He gave the xenoc a small bow.
Oski Katsura tapped the environment bubble with a fingernail. “We cleaned and tested all the components
before we reassembled it,” she told Ione. “That ice wasn’t pure water, there were some peculiar hydrocarbons mixed in.”
“Laymil faecal matter,” Lieria said through the wafer.
“Quite. But the real challenge came from the data itself, it was like nothing we have found so far. It seemed almost totally randomized. At first we thought it might be some kind of artform, then we began to notice irregular trait repetition.”
The same patterns repeated in different combinations, Tranquillity translated.
The science staff always go through this rigmarole, don’t they? she asked, half amused.
It is their chance to demonstrate to you, their paymaster, the effort they put in. Don’t disillusion them, it is impolite.
Ione kept her face neutral during the second-long exchange. “Which was enough to formulate a recognition program,” she said smoothly.
“Quite,” said Oski Katsura. “Ninety per cent of the data was garbage to us, but these patterns kept appearing.”
“Once we had enough of them clearly identified we held an interdisciplinary conference and asked for best guesses,” Parker Higgens said. “Bit of a long shot, but it paid off handsomely. I’m pleased to say Lieria said they resembled Laymil optical impulses.”
“Correct,” Lieria said through the wafer. “Similarity approaching eighty-five per cent. The data packages represented colours to a Laymil eye.”
“Once we’d established that, we ran a comparison on the rest of the data, trying to match it with other Laymil nerve impulses,” Oski Katsura said. “Jackpot. Well, more or less. It took four months to write interpretation programs and build suitable interface units, but we got there in the end.” A wave of her hand took in the benches and all their elaborate equipment. “We unravelled the first full sequence last night.”
Dawning realization at what Oski Katsura was actually saying brought a sense of real excitement to Ione. Her eyes were drawn to the stack in its protective bubble. She touched the transparent surface reverently, it was warmer than the ambient temperature. “This is a recording of a Laymil sensorium?” she asked.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 45
