It was recent, and human, and there was something about it that struck her as discordant. The mind was damaged, as if it had been captured imperfectly. It was disfigured, giving off squalls of hurt. It had suffered dreadfully. It was reaching out to her, craving love and affection; it searched for something to cling to in the abyssal loneliness it now knew.
Images ghosted through her mind. Something was burning. Flames licked through the interstitial gaps in a great black structure. She couldn’t tell if it was a building or a vast, pyramidal bonfire.
She heard screams, and then something hysterical, which she at first took for more screaming, until she realised that it was something far, far worse. It was laughter, and as the flames roared higher, consuming the mass, smothering the screams, the laughter only intensified.
She thought it might be the laughter of a child.
Perhaps it was her imagination, but this mind appeared more fluid than the others. Its thoughts were still slow — far slower than Naqi’s — but the mind appeared to have usurped more than its share of processing resources. It was stealing computational cycles from neighbouring minds, freezing them into absolute stasis while it completed a single sluggish thought.
The mind worried Naqi. Pain and fury was boiling off it.
Mina kenned it too. Naqi tasted Mina’s thoughts and knew that her sister was equally disturbed by the mind’s presence. Then she felt the mind’s attention shift, drawn to the two inquisitive minds that had just entered the sea. It became aware of both of them, quietly watchful. A moment or two passed, and then the mind slipped away, back to wherever it had come from.
She felt her sister’s reply.
She sensed Mina’s hesitation.
Something happened then. It was a loosening, a feeling that the ocean’s grip on Naqi had just relented to a significant degree. Mina, and the roaring background of other minds, fell away to something much more distant. It was as if Naqi had just stepped out of a babbling party into a quiet adjacent room, and was even now moving further and further away from the door.
Her body tingled. She no longer felt the same deadening paralysis. Pearl-grey light flickered above. Without being sure whether she was doing it herself, she rose towards the surface. She was aware that she was moving away from Mina, but for now all that mattered was to escape the sea. She wanted to be as far from that discordant mind as possible.
Her head rammed through a crust of green into air. At the same moment the Juggler organisms fled her body in a convulsive rush. She thrashed stiff limbs and took in deep, panicked breaths. The transition was horrible, but it was over in a few seconds. She looked around, expecting to see the sheer walls of the lagoon, but all she saw in one direction was open water. Naqi felt panic rising again. Then she kicked herself around and saw a wavy line of bottle-green that had to be the perimeter of the node, perhaps half a kilometre away from her present position. The airship was a distant silvery teardrop that appeared to be perched on the surface of the node itself.
In her fear she did not immediately think of Mina. All she wanted to do was reach the safety of the airship, to be aloft. Then she saw the raft, bobbing only one or two hundred metres away. Somehow it had been transplanted to the open waters as well. It looked distant but reachable. She started swimming, fear giving her strength and sense of purpose. In truth, she was well within the true boundary of the node: the water was still thick with suspended micro-organisms, so that it was more like swimming through cold green soup. It made each stroke harder, but she did not have to expend much effort to stay afloat.
Did she trust the Pattern Jugglers not to harm her? Perhaps. After all, she had not encountered their minds at all — if they even had minds. They were merely the archiving system. Blaming them for that one poisoned mind was like blaming a library for one hateful book.
But still, it had unnerved her profoundly. She wondered why none of the other swimmers had ever communicated their encounters with such a mind. After all, she remembered it well enough now, and she was nearly out of the ocean. She might forget shortly — there were bound to be subsequent neurological effects — but under other circumstances there would have been nothing to prevent her relating her experiences to a witness or inviolable recording system.
She kept swimming, and began to wonder why Mina hadn’t emerged from the waters as well. Mina had been just as terrified. But Mina had also been more curious, and more willing to ignore her fears. Naqi had grasped the opportunity to leave the ocean once the Jugglers released their grip on her. But what if Mina had elected to remain?
What if Mina was still down there, still in communion with the Jugglers?
Naqi reached the raft and hauled herself aboard, being careful not to capsize it. She saw that the raft was still largely intact. It had been moved, but not damaged, and although the ceramic sheathing was showing signs of attack, peppered here and there with scabbed green accretions, it was certainly good for another few hours. The rot-hardened control systems were alive, and still in telemetric connection with the distant airship.
Naqi had crawled from the sea naked. Now she felt cold and vulnerable. She pulled an aluminised quilt from the raft’s supply box and wrapped it around herself. It did not stop her from shivering, did not make her feel any less nauseous, but at least it afforded some measure of symbolic barrier against the sea.
She looked around again, but there was still no sign of Mina.
Naqi folded aside the weatherproof control cover and tapped commands into the matrix of waterproofed keys. She waited for the response from the airship. The moment stretched. But there it was: a minute shift in the dull gleam on the silver back of the vacuum-bladder. The airship was turning, pivoting like a great slow weather vane. It was moving, responding to the raft’s homing command.
But where was Mina?
Now something moved in the water next to her, coiling in weak, enervated spasms. Naqi looked at it with horrified recognition. She reached over, still shivering, and with appalled gentleness fished the writhing thing from the sea. It lay in her fingers like a baby sea serpent. It was white and segmented, half a metre long. She knew exactly what it was.
It was Mina’s worm. It meant Mina had died.
TWO
Two years later Naqi watched a spark fall from the heavens.
Along with many hundreds of spectators, she was standing on the railed edge of one of Umingmaktok’s elegant cantilevered arms. It was afternoon. Every visible surface of the city had been scoured of rot and given a fresh coat of crimson or emerald paint. Amber bunting had been hung along the metal stay-lines that supported the tapering arms protruding from the city’s towering commercial core. Most of the berthing slots around the perimeter were occupied by passenger or cargo craft, while many smaller vessels were holding station in the immediate airspace around Umingmaktok. The effect, which Naqi had seen on her approach to the city a day earlier, had been to turn the snowflake into a glittering, delicately ornamented vision. By night they had fireworks displays. By day, as now, conjurors and confidence tricksters wound their way through the crowds. Nose-flute musicians and drum dancers performed impromptu atop improvised podia. Kick-boxers were being cheered on as they moved from one
