Pattern Jugglers had been encountered on many worlds that conformed to the same aquatic template as Ararat. After years of study, there was still no agreement as to whether or not the aliens were intelligent in their own right. But all the same it was clear that they prized intelligence themselves, preserving it with the loving devotion of curators.
Now and then, when a person swam in the seas of a Juggler planet, the microscopic organisms entered the swimmer’s nervous system. It was a kinder process than the neural invasion that had taken place aboard Galiana’s ship. The Juggler organisms only wanted to record, and when they had unravelled the swimmer’s neural patterns they would retreat. The mind of the swimmer would have been captured by the sea, but the swimmer was almost always free to return to land. Usually, they felt no change at all. Rarely, they would turn out to have been given a subtle gift, a tweak to their neurological architecture that permitted superhuman cognition or insight. Mostly it lasted for only a few hours, but very infrequently it appeared permanent.
There was no way to tell if Galiana had gained any gifts after she had swum in the ocean of this world, but her mind had certainly been captured. It was there now, frozen beneath the waves, waiting to be imprinted on the consciousness of another swimmer.
Clavain had guessed this, but he had not been the first to attempt communion with Galiana. That honour had fallen to Felka. For twenty years she had swum, immersed in the memories and glacial consciousness of her mother. In all that time Clavain had held back from swimming himself, fearing perhaps that when he encountered the imprint of Galiana he would find it in some sense wrong, untrue to his memory of what she had been. His doubts had ebbed over the years, but he had still never made the final commitment of swimming. Nonetheless, Felka — who had always craved the complexity of experience that the ocean offered — had swum regularly, and she had reported back her experiences to Clavain. Through his daughter he had again achieved some connection with Galiana, and for the time being, until he summoned the courage to swim himself, that had been enough.
But two years ago the sea had taken Felka, and she had not returned.
Scorpio thought about that now, choosing his next words with great care. ‘Nevil, I understand this is difficult for you, but you must also understand that this thing, whatever it is, could be a very serious matter for the settlement.’
‘I get that, Scorp.’
‘But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?’
‘I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters.’
‘Maybe we don’t. Me, I don’t really care about the bigger picture. It’s never been my strong point.’
‘Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have.’
‘So you think there are millions — billions — of people out there who are going to die? People we’ve never met, people we’ve never come within a light-year of in our lives?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Well, sorry, but that isn’t the way my head works. I just can’t process that kind of threat. I don’t
‘You think so?’
‘I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That’s a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping.’
‘But you didn’t actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?’ Clavain did not wait for Scorpio’s answer. ‘And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a re-entry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Scorpio said. He couldn’t tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. ‘But whatever it is must have come down recently. It’s not like any of the other artefacts we’ve pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren’t so thick. This thing didn’t look as though it had been under for more than a few days.’
Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease.
They were returning to the tent.
‘I watch the skies a lot, Scorp,’ Clavain said. ‘At night, when there aren’t any clouds. Lately I’ve been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain’s just been pulled back for an instant. I’m guessing you think that makes me mad, don’t you?’
Scorpio didn’t know what he thought. ‘Alone out here, anyone would see things,’ he said.
‘But it wasn’t cloudy last night,’ Clavain said, ‘or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn’t see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us.’
‘We haven’t seen anything either.’
‘How about radio transmissions? Laser squirts?’
‘Not a peep. And you’re right: it doesn’t make very much sense. But like it or not, there’s still a capsule, and it isn’t going away. I want you to come and see it for yourself.’
Clavain shoved hair from his eyes. The lines and wrinkles in his face had become shadowed crevasses and gorges, like the contours of an improbably weathered landscape. Scorpio thought that he had aged ten or twenty years in the six months he had been on this island.
‘You said something about there being someone inside it.’
While they had been talking, the cloud cover had begun to break up in swathes. The sky beyond had the pale, crazed blue of a jackdaw’s eye.
‘It’s still a secret,’ Scorpio said. ‘Only a few of us know that the thing’s been found at all. That’s why I came here by boat. A shuttle would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have been low-key. If people find out we’ve brought you back they’ll think there’s a crisis coming. Besides which, it isn’t supposed to be this easy to bring you back. They still think you’re somewhere halfway around the world.’
‘You insisted on that lie?’
‘What do you think would have been more reassuring? To let the people think you’d gone on an expedition — a potentially hazardous one, admittedly — or to tell them you’d gone away to sit on an island and toy with the idea of committing suicide?’
‘They’ve been through worse. They could have taken it.’
‘It’s what they’ve been through that made me think they could do without the truth,’ Scorpio said.
‘Anyway, it isn’t suicide.’ He stopped and looked back out to sea. ‘I know she’s there, with her mother. I can feel it, Scorpio. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know she’s still here. I read about this sort of thing happening on other Juggler worlds, you know. Now and then they take swimmers, dismantle their bodies completely and incorporate them into the organic matrix of the sea. No one knows why. But swimmers who enter the oceans afterwards say that sometimes they feel the presence of the ones who vanished. It’s a much stronger impression than the usual stored memories and personalities. They say they experience something close to dialogue.’
Scorpio held back a sigh. He had listened to exactly the same speech before he had taken Clavain out to this island six months ago. Clearly the period of isolation had done nothing to lessen Clavain’s conviction that Felka had not simply drowned.
‘So hop in and find out for yourself,’ he said.
‘I would, but I’m scared.’
‘That the ocean might take you as well?’
‘No.’ Clavain turned to face Scorpio. He looked less surprised than affronted. ‘No, of course not.
Rashmika Els had spent much of her childhood being told not to look quite so serious. That was what they would have said if they could have seen her now: perched on her bed in the half-light, selecting the very few personal effects she could afford to carry on her mission. And she would have given them precisely the same look of pique she always mustered on those occasions. Except this time she would have known with a deeper conviction than usual that she was right and they were wrong. Because even though she was still only seventeen, she knew
