Alastair Reynolds - Turquoise Days

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Turquoise Days

‘Set sail in those Turquoise Days’

Echo and the Bunnymen

ONE

Naqi Okpik waited until her sister was safely asleep before she stepped onto the railed balcony that

circled the gondola.

It was the most perfectly warm and still summer night in months. Even the breeze caused by the

airship's motion was warmer than usual, as soft against her cheek as the breath of an attentive lover.

Above, yet hidden by the black curve of the vacuum-bag, the two moons were nearly at their fullest.

Microscopic creatures sparkled a hundred metres under the airship, great schools of them daubing

galaxies against the profound black of the sea. Spirals, flukes and arms of luminescence wheeled

and coiled as if in thrall to secret music.

Naqi looked to the rear, where the airship's ceramic-jacketed sensor pod carved a twinkling

furrow. Pinks and rubies and furious greens sparkled in the wake. Occasionally they darted from

point to point with the nervous motion of kingfishers. As ever, she was alert to anything unusual in

movements of the messenger sprites, anything that might merit a note in the latest circular, or even

a full-blown article in one of the major journals of Juggler studies. But there was nothing odd

happening tonight, no yet-to-be catalogued forms or behaviour patterns, nothing that might indicate

more significant Pattern Juggler activity.

She walked around the airship's balcony until she had reached the stern, where the submersible

sensor pod was tethered by a long fibre-optic dragline. Naqi pulled a long hinged stick from her

pocket, flicked it open in the manner of a courtesan's fan and then waved it close to the winch

assembly. The default watercoloured lilies and sea serpents melted away, replaced by tables of

numbers, sinuous graphs and trembling histograms. A glance established that there was nothing

surprising here either, but the data would still form a useful calibration set for other experiments.

As she closed the fan -- delicately, for it was worth almost as much as the airship itself – Naqi

reminded herself that it was a day since she had gathered the last batch of incoming messages. Rot

had taken out the connection between the antenna and the gondola during the last expedition, and

since then collecting the messages had become a chore, to be taken in turns or traded for less

tedious tasks.

Naqi gripped a handrail and swung out behind the airship. Here the vacuum-bag overhung the

gondola by only a metre, and a grilled ladder allowed her to climb around the overhang unravel and

scramble onto the flat top of the bag. She moved gingerly, bare feet against rusting rungs, doing her

best not to disturb Mina. The airship rocked and creaked a little as she found her balance on the top

and then was again silent and still. The churning of its motors was so quiet that Naqi had long ago

filtered the sound from her experience.

All was calm, beautifully so.

In the moonlight the antenna was a single dark flower rising from the broad back of the bladder.

Naqi started moving along the railed catwalk that led to it, steadying herself as she went but feeling

much less vertigo than would have been the case in daylight.

Then she froze, certain that she was being watched.

Just within Naqi's peripheral vision appeared a messenger sprite. It had flown to the height of the

airship and was now sprite. It had flown to the height of the airship and was now shadowing it from

a distance of ten or twelve metres. Naqi gasped, delighted and unnerved at the same time. Apart

from dead specimens this was the first time Naqi had ever seen a sprite this close. The organism had

the approximate size and morphology of a terrestrial hummingbird, yet it glowed like a lantern.

Naqi recognised it immediately as a long-range packet carrier. Its belly would be stuffed with data

coded into tightly packed wads of RNA, locked within microscopic protein capsomeres. The packet

carrier's head was a smooth teardrop, patterned with luminous pastel markings, but lacking any

other detail save for two black eyes positioned above the midline. Inside the head was a cluster of

neurones, which encoded the positions of the brightest circumpolar stars. Other than that, sprites

had only the most rudimentary kind of intelligence. They existed to shift information between nodal

points in the ocean when the usual chemical signalling pathways were deemed too slow or

imprecise. The sprite would die when it reached its destination, consumed by microscopic

organisms that would unravel and process the information stored in the capsomeres.

And yet Naqi had the acute impression that it was watching her: not just the airship, but her, with

a kind of watchful curiosity that made the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. And then -- just at

the point when the feeling of scrutiny had become unsettling -- the sprite whipped sharply away

from the airship. Naqi watched it descend back towards the ocean and then coast above the surface,

bobbing now and then like a skipping stone. She remained still for several more minutes, convinced

that something of significance had happened, though aware too of how subjective the experience

had been; how unimpressive it would seem if she tried to explain it to Mina tomorrow. Anyway,

Mina was the one with the special bond with the ocean, wasn't she? Mina was the one who

scratched her arms at night; Mina was the one who had too high a conformal index to be allowed

into the swimmer corps. It was always Mina.

It was never Naqi.

The antenna's metre-wide dish was anchored to a squat plinth inset with weatherproofed controls

and readouts. It was century-old Pelican technology, like the airship and the fan. Many of the

controls and displays were dead, but the unit was still able to lock onto the functioning satellites.

Naqi flicked open the fan and copied the latest feeds into the fan's remaining memory. Then she

knelt down next to the plinth, propped the fan on her knees and sifted through the messages and

news summaries of the last day. A handful of reports had arrived from friends in Prachuap-

Pangnirtung and Umingmaktok snowflake cities, another from an old boyfriend in the swimmer

corps station on Narathiwat atoll. He had sent her a list of jokes that were already in wide

circulation. She scrolled down the list, grimacing more than grinning, before finally managing a

half-hearted chuckle at one that had previously escaped her. Then there were a dozen digests from

various special interest groups related to the Jugglers, along with a request from a journal editor that

she critique a paper. Naqi skimmed the paper's abstract and thought that she was probably capable

of reviewing it.

She checked through the remaining messages. There was a note from Dr Sivaraksa saying that

her formal application to work on the Moat project had been received and was now under

consideration. There had been no official interview, but Naqi had met Sivaraksa a few weeks earlier

when both of them happened to be in Umingmaktok. Sivaraksa had been in an encouraging mood

during the meeting, though Naqi couldn't say whether that was because she'd given a good

impression or because Sivaraksa had just had his tapeworm swapped for a nice new one. But

Sivaraksa's message said she could expect to hear the result in a day or two. Naqi wondered idly

how she would break the news to Mina if she was offered the job. Mina was critical of the whole

idea of the Moat and would probably take a dim view of her sister having anything to do with it.

Scrolling down further, she read another message from a scientist in Qaanaaq requesting access

to some calibration data she had obtained earlier in the summer. Then there were four or five

automatic weather advisories, drafts of two papers she was contributing to, and an invitation to

attend the amicable divorce of Kugluktuk and Gjoa, scheduled to take place in three weeks' time.

Following that there was a summary of the latest worldwide news -- an unusually bulky file – and

then there was nothing. No further messages had arrived for eight hours.

There was nothing particularly unusual about that -- the ailing network was always going down --

but for the second time that night the back of Naqi's neck tingled. Something must have happened,

she thought.

She opened the news summary and started reading. Five minutes later she was waking Mina.

'I don't think I want to believe it,' Mina Okpik said.

Naqi scanned the heavens, dredging childhood knowledge of the stars. With some minor

adjustment to allow for parallax, the old constellations were still more or less valid when seen from

Turquoise.

'That's it, I think.'

'What?' Mina said, still sleepy.

Naqi waved her hand at a vague area of the sky, pinned between Scorpius and Hercules.

'Ophiuchus. If our eyes were sensitive enough, we'd be able to see it now: a little prick of blue light.'

'I've had enough of little pricks for one lifetime,' Mina said tucking her arms around her knees.

Her hair was the same pure black as Naqi's, but trimmed into a severe, spiked crop which made her

look younger or older depending on the light. She wore black shorts and a shirt that left her arms

bare. Luminous tattoos in emerald and indigo spiralled around the piebald marks of random fungal

invasion that covered her arms, thighs, neck and cheeks. The fullness of the moons caused the

fungal patterns to glow a little themselves, shimmering with the same emerald and indigo hues.

Naqi had no tattoos and scarcely any fungal patterns of her own; she couldn't help but feel slightly

envious of her sister's adornments.

Mina continued, 'But seriously, you don't think it might be a mistake?'

'I don't think so, no. See what it says there? They detected it weeks ago, but they kept quiet until

now so that they could make more measurements.'

'I'm surprised there wasn't a rumour.'

Naqi nodded. 'They kept the lid on it pretty well. Which doesn't mean there isn't going to be a lot

of trouble.'

'Mm. And they think this blackout is going to help?'

'My guess is official traffic's still getting through. They just don't want the rest of us clogging up

the network with endless speculation.'

'Can't blame us for that, can we? I mean, everyone's going to be guessing, aren't they?'

'Maybe they'll announce themselves before very long,' Naqi said doubtfully.

While they had been speaking the airship had passed into a zone of the sea largely devoid of

bioluminescent surface life. Such zones were almost as common as the nodal regions where the

network was thickest, like the gaping voids between clusters of galaxies. The wake of the sensor

pod was almost impossible to pick out, and the darkness around them was absolute, relieved only

by the occasional mindless errand of a solitary messenger sprite.

Mina said: 'And if they don't?'

'Then I guess we're all in a lot more trouble than we'd like.'

For the first time in a century a ship was approaching Turquoise, commencing its deceleration

from interstellar cruise speed. The flare of the lighthugger's exhaust was pointed straight at the

Turquoise system. Measurement of the Doppler shift of the flame showed that the vessel was still

two years out, but that was hardly any time at all on Turquoise. The ship had yet to announce itself,

but even if it turned out to have nothing but benign intentions -- a short trade stopover, perhaps –

the effect on Turquoise society would be incalculable. Everyone knew of the troubles that had

followed the arrival of Pelican in Impiety. When the Ultras moved into orbit there had been much

unrest below. Spies had undermined lucrative trade deals. Cities had jockeyed for prestige,

competing for technological tidbits. There had been hasty marriages and equally hasty separations.

A century later, old enmities smouldered just beneath the surface of cordial intercity politics.

It wouldn't be any better this time.

'Look,' Mina said, 'it doesn't have to be all that bad. They might not even want to talk to us.

Didn't a ship pass through the system about seventy years ago without so much as a by-your-leave?'

Naqi agreed; it was mentioned in a sidebar to one of the main articles. 'They had engine trouble,

or something. But the experts say there's no sign of anything like that this time.'

'So they've come to trade. What have we got to offer them that we didn't have last time?'

'Not much, I suppose.'

Mina nodded knowingly. ' A few works of art that probably won't travel very well. Ten-hour-long

nose-flute symphonies, anyone?' She pulled a face. 'That's supposedly my culture, and even I can't

stand it. What else? A handful of discoveries about the Jugglers, which have more than likely been

replicated elsewhere a dozen times. Technology, medicine? Forget it.'

'They must think we have something worth coming here for,' Naqi said. 'Whatever it is, we'll just

have to wait and see, won't we? It's only two years.'

'I expect you think that's quite a long time,' Mina said.

'Actually----'

Mina froze.

'Look!'

Something whipped past in the night, far below, then a handful of them; then a dozen, and then a

whole bright squadron. Messenger sprites, Naqi realised -- but she had never seen so many of them

moving at once, and on what was so evidently the same errand. Against the darkness of the ocean

the lights were mesmerising: curling and weaving, swapping positions and occasionally veering far

from the main pack before arcing back towards the swarm. Once again one of the sprites climbed to

the altitude of the airship, loitering for a few moments on fanning wings before whipping off to

rejoin the others. The swarm receded, becoming a tight ball of fireflies, and then only a pale

globular smudge. Naqi watched until she was certain that the last sprite had vanished into the night.

'Wow,' Mina said quietly.

'Have you ever seen anything like that?'

'Never.'

'Bit funny that it should happen tonight, wouldn't you say?'

'Don't be silly,' Mina said. 'The Jugglers can't possibly know about the ship.'

'We don't know that for sure. Most people heard about this ship hours ago. That's more than

enough time for someone to have swum.'

Mina conceded her younger sister's point. 'Still, information flow isn't usually that clear-cut. The

Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We're

dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator.'

'That's one view.'

Mina shrugged. 'I'd love to be proved otherwise.'

'Well, do you think we should try following them? I know we can't track sprites over any

distance, but we might be able to keep up for a few hours before we drain the batteries.'

'We wouldn't learn much.'

'We won't know until we've tried,' Naqi said, gritting her teeth. 'Come on -- it's got to be worth a

go, hasn't it? I reckon that swarm moved a bit slower than a single sprite. We'd at least have enough

for a report, wouldn't we?'

Mina shook her head. 'All we'd have is a single observation with a little bit of speculation thrown

in. You know we can't publish that sort of thing. And anyway, assuming that sprite swarm did have

something to do with the ship, there are going to be hundreds of similar sightings tonight.'

'I just thought it might take our minds off the news.'

'Perhaps it would. But it would also make us unforgivably late for our target.' Mina dropped the

tone of her voice, making an obvious effort to sound reasonable. 'Look, I understand your curiosity.

I feel it as well. But the chances are it was either a statistical fluke or part of a global event everyone

else will have had a much better chance to study. Either way we can't contribute anything useful, so

we might as well just forget about it.' She rubbed at the marks on her forearm, tracing the Paisley-

patterned barbs and whorls of glowing colouration. 'And I'm tired, and we have several busy days

ahead of us. I think we just need to put this one down to experience, all right?'

'Fine,' Naqi said.

'I'm sorry, but I just know we'd be wasting our time.'

'I said fine.' Naqi stood up and steadied herself on the railing that traversed the length of the

airship's back.

'Where are you going?'

'To sleep. Like you said, we've got a busy day coming up. We'd be fools to waste time chasing a

fluke, wouldn't we?'

An hour after dawn they crossed out of the dead zone. The sea below began to thicken with floating

life, becoming soupy and torpid. A kilometre or so further in and the soup showed ominous signs of

structure: a blue-green stew of ropy strands and wide, kelplike plates. They suggested the floating,

half-digested entrails of embattled sea monsters.

Within another kilometre the floating life had become a dense vegetative raft, stinking of brine

and rotting cabbage. Within another kilometre of that the raft had thickened to the point where the

underlying sea was only intermittently visible. The air above the raft was humid, hot and pungent

with microscopic irritants. The raft itself was possessed of a curiously beguiling motion, bobbing

and writhing and gyring according to the ebb and flow of weirdly localised current systems. It was

as if many invisible spoons were stirring a great bowl of spinach. Even the shadow of the airship,

pushed far ahead of it by the low sun, had some influence on the movement of the material. The

Pattern Juggler biomass scurried and squirmed to evade the track of the shadow, and the peculiar

purposefulness of the motion reminded Naqi of an octopus she had seen in the terrestrial habitats

aquarium on Umingmaktok, squeezing its way through impossibly small gaps in the glass prison of

its tank.

Presently they arrived at the precise centre of the circular raft. It spread away from them in all

directions, hemmed by a distant ribbon of sparkling sea. It felt as if the airship had come to rest

above an island, as fixed and ancient as any geological feature. The island even had a sort of

geography: humps and ridges and depressions sculpted into the cloying texture of layered biomass.

But there were few islands on Turquoise, especially at this latitude, and the Juggler node was only a

few days old. Satellites had detected its growth a week earlier, and Mina and Naqi had been sent to

investigate. They were under strict instructions simply to hover above the island and deploy a

handful of tethered sensors. If the node showed any signs of being unusual, a more experienced

team would be sent out from Umingmaktok by high-speed dirigible. Most nodes dispersed within

twenty to thirty days, so there was always a need for some urgency. They might even send trained

swimmers, eager to dive into the sea and open their minds to alien communion. Ready -- as they

called it -- to ken the ocean.

But first things first: chances were this node would turn out to be interesting rather than

exceptional.

'Morning,' Mina said when Naqi approached her. Mina was swabbing the sensor pod she had

reeled in earlier, collecting the green mucus that had adhered to its ceramic teardrop. All human

artefacts eventually succumbed to biological attack from the ocean, although ceramics were the

most resilient.

'You're cheerful,' Naqi said, trying to make the statement sound matter-of-fact rather than

judgmental.

'Aren't you? It's not everyone gets a chance to study a node up this close. Make the most of it, sis.

The news we got last night doesn't change what we have to do today.'

Naqi scraped the back of her hand across her nose. Now that the airship was above the node she

was breathing vast numbers of aerial organisms into her lungs with each breath. The smell was

redolent of ammonia and decomposing vegetation. It required an intense effort of will not to keep

rubbing her eyes rawer than they already were. 'Do you see anything unusual?'

'Bit early to say.'

'So that's a "no", then.'

'You can't learn much without probes, Naqi.' Mina dipped a swab into a collection bag, squeezing

tight the plastic seal. Then she dropped the bag into a bucket between her feet. 'Oh, wait. I saw

another of those swarms, after you'd gone to sleep.'

'I thought you were the one complaining about being tired.'

Mina dug out a fresh swab and rubbed vigorously at a deep olive smear on the side of the sensor.

'I picked up my messages, that's all. Tried again this morning, but the blackout still hasn't been

lifted. I picked up a few short-wave radio signals from the closest cities, but they were just

transmitting a recorded message from the Snowflake Council: stay tuned and don't panic.'

'So let's hope we don't find anything significant here,' Naqi said, 'because we won't be able to

report it if we do.'

'They're bound to lift the blackout soon. In the meantime I think we have enough measurements

to keep us busy. Did you find that spiral sweep programme in the airship's avionics box?'

'I haven't looked for it,' Naqi said, certain that Mina had never mentioned such a thing before.

'But I'm sure I can programme something from scratch in a few minutes.'

'Well, let's not waste any more time than necessary. Here.' Smiling, she offered Naqi the swab, its

tip laden with green slime. 'You take over this and I'll go and dig out the programme.'

Naqi took the swab after a moment's delay.

'Of course. Prioritise tasks according to ability, right?'

'That's not what I meant,' Mina said soothingly. 'Look, let's not argue, shall we? We were best

friends until last night. I just thought it would be quicker...' She trailed off and shrugged. 'You know

what I mean. I know you blame me for not letting us follow the sprites, but we had no choice but to

come here. Understand that, will you? Under any other circumstances----'

'I understand,' Naqi said, realising as she did how sullen and childlike she sounded; how much

she was playing the petulant younger sister. The worst of it was that she knew Mina was right. At

dawn it all looked much clearer.

'Do you? Really?'

Naqi nodded, feeling the perverse euphoria that came with an admission of defeat. 'Yes. Really.

We'd have been wrong to chase them.'

Mina sighed. 'I was tempted, you know. I just didn't want you to see how tempted I was, or else

you'd have found a way to convince me.'

'I'm that persuasive?'

'Don't underestimate yourself, sis. I know I never would.' Mina paused and took back the swab.

'I'll finish this. Can you handle the sweep programme?

Naqi smiled. She felt better now. The tension between them would still take a little while to

dissipate, but at least things were easier now. Mina was right about something else: they were best

friends, not just sisters.

'I'll handle it,' Naqi said.

Naqi stepped through the hermetic curtain into the air-conditioned cool of the gondola. She closed

the door, rubbed her eyes and then sat down at the navigator's station. The airship had flown itself

automatically from Umingmaktok, adjusting its course to take cunning advantage of jet streams and

weather fronts. Now it was in hovering mode: once or twice a minute the electrically driven motors

purred, stabilising the craft against gusts of wind generated by the microclimate above the Juggler

node. Naqi called up the current avionics programme, a menu of options appearing on a flat screen.

The options quivered; Naqi thumped the screen with the back of her hand until the display behaved

itself. Then she scrolled down through the other flight sequences, but there was no preprogramme

spiral loaded into the current avionics suite. Naqi rummaged around in the background files, but

there was nothing to help her there either. She was about to start hacking something together -- at a

push it would take her half an hour to assemble a routine -- when she remembered that she had once

backed up some earlier avionics files onto the fan. She had no idea if they were still there, or even if

there was anything useful amongst the cache, but it was probably worth taking the time to find out.

The fan lay closed on a bench; Mina must have left it there after she had verified that the blackout

was still in force.

Naqi grabbed the fan and spread it open across her lap. To her surprise, it was still active: instead

of the usual watercolour patterns the display showed the messages she had been scrolling through

earlier.

She looked closer and frowned. These were not her messages at all. She was looking at the

messages Mina had copied onto the fan during the night. Naqi felt an immediate prickle of guilt: she

should snap the fan shut, or at the very least close her sister's mail and move into her own area of

the fan. But she did neither of those things. Telling herself that it was only what anyone else would

have done, she accessed the final message in the list and examined its incoming time-stamp. To

within a few minutes, it had arrived at the same time as the final message Naqi had received.

Mina had been telling the truth when she said that the blackout was continuing.

Naqi glanced up. Through the window of the gondola she could see the back of her sister's head,

bobbing up and down as she checked winches along the side.

Naqi looked at the body of the message. It was nothing remarkable, just an automated circular

from one of the Juggler special-interest groups. Something about neurotransmitter chemistry.

She exited the circular, getting back to the list of incoming messages. She told herself that she

had done nothing shameful so far. If she closed Mina's mail now, she would have nothing to feel

really guilty about.

But a name she recognised jumped out at her from the list of messages: Dr Jotah Sivaraksa,

manager of the Moat project. The man she had met in Umingmaktok, glowing with renewed vitality

after his yearly worm change. What could Mina possibly want with Sivaraksa?

She opened the message, read it.

It was exactly what she had feared, and yet not dared to believe.

Sivaraksa was responding to Mina's request to work on the Moat. The tone of the message was

conversational, in stark contrast to the businesslike response Naqi had received. Sivaraksa informed

her sister that her request had been appraised favourably, and that while there were still one or two

other candidates to be considered, Mina had so far emerged as the most convincing applicant. Even

if this turned out not to be the case, Sivaraksa continued -- and that was not very likely -- Mina's

name would be at the top of the list when further vacancies became available. In short, she was

more or less guaranteed a chance to work on the Moat within the year.

Naqi read the message again, just in case there was some highly subtle detail that threw the entire

thing into a different, more benign light.

Then she snapped shut the fan with a sense of profound fury. She placed it back where it was,

exactly as it had been.

Mina pushed her head through the hermetic curtain.

'How's it coming along!'

'Fine,' Naqi said. Her voice sounded drained of emotion even to herself. She felt stunned and

mute. Mina would call her a hypocrite were she to object to her sister having applied for exactly the

same job she had... but there was more to it than that. Naqi had never been as openly critical of the

Moat project as her sister. By contrast, Mina had never missed a chance to denounce both the

project and the personalities behind it.

Now that was real hypocrisy.

'Got that routine cobbled together?'

'Coming along,' Naqi said.

'Something the matter?'

'No,' Naqi forced a smile, 'no. Just working through the details. Have it ready in a few minutes.'

'Good. Can't wait to start the sweep. We're going to get some beautiful data, sis. And I think this

is going to be a significant node. Maybe the largest this season. Aren't you glad it came our way!'

'Thrilled,' Naqi said, before returning to her work.

Thirty specialised probes hung on telemetric cables from the underside of the gondola, dangling like

the venom-tipped stingers of some grotesque aerial jellyfish. The probes sniffed the air metres

above the Juggler biomass, or skimmed the fuzzy green surface of the formation. Weighted plumb

lines penetrated to the sea beneath the raft, sipping the organism-infested depths dozens of metres

under the node. Radar mapped larger structures embedded within the node -- dense kernels of com-

pacted biomass, or huge cavities and tubes of inscrutable function -- while sonar graphed the

topology of the many sinewy organic cables which plunged into darkness, umbilicals anchoring the

node to the seabed. Smaller nodes drew most of their energy from sunlight and the breakdown of

sugars and fats in the sea's other floating micro-organisms but the larger formations, which had a

vastly higher information-processing burden, needed to tap belching aquatic fissures, active rifts in

the ocean bed kilometres under the waves. Cold water was pumped down each umbilical by

peristaltic compression waves, heated by being circulated in the superheated thermal environment

of the underwater volcanoes, and then pumped back to the surface.

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 prob-

ably 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.'

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