thick at the trunk but narrowing to the dimensions of plant fronds, and then narrowing further, bifurcating into lacy, fernlike hazes of awesome complexity. They diffracted light like the wings of dragonflies. They were closing over the lagoon, forming a shimmering canopy. Now and then a sprite — or something smaller but equally bright — arced from one bank of the lagoon to another. Brighter things moved through the water like questing fish. Microscopic organisms were detaching from the larger fronds and tendrils, swarming in purposeful clouds. They batted against her skin, against her eyelids. Every breath that she took made her cough. The taste of the Pattern Jugglers was sour and medicinal. They were in her, invading her body.
She panicked. It was as if a tiny switch had flipped in her mind. Suddenly all other concerns melted away. She had to get out of the lagoon immediately, no matter what Mina would think of her.
Thrashing more than swimming, Naqi tried to push herself towards the raft, but as soon as the panic reaction had kicked in, she had felt something else slide over her. It was not so much paralysis as an immense sense of inertia. Moving, even breathing, became problematic. The boat was impossibly distant. She was no longer capable of treading water. She felt heavy, and when she looked down she saw that a green haze had enveloped the parts of her body that she could see above water. The organisms were adhering to the fabric of her wetsuit.
‘Mina—’ she called, ‘Mina!’
But Mina only looked at her. Naqi sensed that her sister was experiencing the same sort of paralysis. Mina’s movements had become languid; instead of panic, what Naqi saw on her face was profound resignation and acceptance. It was dangerously close to serenity.
Mina wasn’t frightened at all.
The patterns on her neck were flaring vividly. Her eyes were closed. Already the organisms had begun to attack the fabric of her suit, stripping it away from her flesh. Naqi could feel the same thing happening to her own suit. There was no pain, for the organisms stopped short of attacking her skin. With a mighty effort she hoisted her forearm from the water, studying the juxtaposition of pale flesh and dissolving black fabric. Her fingers were as stiff as iron.
But — and Naqi clung to this fact — the ocean recognised the sanctity of organisms, or at least, thinking organisms. Strange things might happen to people who swam with the Jugglers, things that might be difficult to distinguish from death or near-death. But people always emerged afterwards, changed perhaps, but essentially whole. No matter what happened now, they would survive. The Jugglers always returned those who swam with them, and even when they did effect changes, they were seldom permanent.
Except, of course, for those who didn’t return.
No, Naqi told herself. What they were doing was foolish, and might perhaps destroy their careers, but they would survive. Mina had flagged high on the conformality index when she had applied to join the swimmer corps, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily at risk. Conformality merely implied a rare connection with the ocean. It verged on the glamorous.
Now Mina was going under. She had stopped moving entirely. Her eyes were blankly ecstatic.
Naqi wanted to resist that same impulse to submit, but all the strength had flowed away from her. She felt herself begin the same descent. The water closed over her mouth, then her eyes, and in a moment she was under. She felt herself a toppled statue sliding towards the seabed. Her fear reached a crescendo, and then passed it. She was not drowning. The froth of green organisms had forced itself down her throat, down her nasal passage. She felt no fright. There was nothing except a profound feeling that this was what she had been born to do.
Naqi knew what was happening, what was going to happen. She had studied enough reports on swimmer missions. The tiny organisms were infiltrating her entire body, creeping into her lungs and bloodstream. They were keeping her alive, while at the same time flooding her with chemical bliss. Droves of the same tiny creatures were seeking routes to her brain, inching along the optic nerve, the aural nerve, or crossing the blood-brain barrier itself. They were laying tiny threads behind them, fibres that extended back into the larger mass of organisms suspended in the water around her. In turn, these organisms would establish data-carrying channels back into the primary mass of the node… And the node itself was connected to other nodes, both chemically and via the packet-carrying sprites. The green threads bound Naqi to the entire ocean. It might take hours for a signal to reach her mind from halfway around Turquoise, but it didn’t matter. She was beginning to think in Juggler time, her own thought processes seeming pointlessly quick, like the motion of bees.
She sensed herself becoming vaster.
She was no longer just a pale, hard-edged thing labelled Naqi, suspended in the lagoon like a dying starfish. Her sense of self was rushing out towards the horizon in all directions, encompassing first the node and then the empty oceanic waters around it. She couldn’t say precisely how this information was reaching her. It wasn’t through visual imagery, but more an intensely detailed spatial awareness. It was as if spatial awareness had suddenly become her most vital sense.
She supposed this was what swimmers meant when they spoke of
She
It was glorious.
For a moment their minds orbited each other, kenning each other on a level of intimacy neither had dreamed possible.
The fear was gone, utterly. In its place was a marvellous feeling of immanence. They had made the right decision, Naqi knew. She had been right to follow Mina. Mina was deliciously happy, basking in the same hopeful sense of security and promise.
And then they began to sense other minds.
Nothing had changed, but it was suddenly clear that the roaring signals from the other nodes were composed of countless individual voices, countless individual streams of chemical information. Each stream was the recording of a mind that had entered the ocean at some point. The oldest minds — those that had entered in the deep past — were the faintest, but they were also the most numerous. They had begun to sound alike, the shapes of their stored personalities blurring into each other, no matter how different — how alien — they had been to start with. The minds that had been captured more recently were sharper and more variegated, like oddly shaped pebbles on a beach. Naqi kenned brutal alienness, baroque architectures of mind shaped by outlandish chains of evolutionary contingency. The only thing any of them had in common was that they had all reached a certain threshold of tool-using intelligence, and had all — for whatever reason — been driven into interstellar space, where they had encountered the Pattern Jugglers. But that was like saying the minds of sharks and leopards were alike because they had both evolved to hunt. The differences between the minds were so cosmically vast that Naqi felt her own mental processes struggling to accommodate them.
Even that was becoming easier. Subtly — slowly enough that from moment to moment she was not aware of it — the organisms in her skull were retuning her neural connections, allowing more and more of her own consciousness to seep out into the extended processing loom of the sea.
Now she sensed the most recent arrivals.
They were all human minds, each a glittering gem of distinctness. Naqi
The minds were snapshots, frozen in the conception of a single thought. It was like an orchestra of instruments, all sustaining a single, unique note. Perhaps there was a grindingly slow evolution in those minds — she felt the merest subliminal hint of change — but if that were the case, it would take centuries to complete a thought… thousands of years to complete the simplest internalised statement. The newest minds might not even have recognised that they had been swallowed by the sea.
And now Naqi could perceive a single mind flaring louder than the others.
