The Revelation Space Collection (443 page)

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 right now they were simply beyond the scope of possible academic study. What they would learn today could not be expected 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 it might later turn out to play a vital role in a 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 towards 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 front line 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 inwards 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 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, one 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 at least, was that nothing was yet 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 towards 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. 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 grey. The creased and crumpled landscape of the node reached away into mid-grey 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 grey, rimmed the lagoon. Naqi studied it quietly. Her sister would 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 make 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.’

Naqi 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’ll 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 for ever.” I take it about as seriously as I take the Thule kraken, or the drowning of Arviat.’

‘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.’

She pushed past Naqi.

‘Where are you going now?’

‘To catch some sleep. I need to be fresh for this. So do 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 was 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 - 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 neither Naqi nor Mina were yet prepared for that level of abject surrender to the ocean’s assault. After another minute the water no longer felt 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 hand or the other, 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.