middle of the room. The captain was absent — little had been seen of Moreau since the shuttle’s arrival in Umingmaktok — but the delegates were talking to a clutch of local bigwigs, none of whom Naqi recognised. Thonburi steered her into the fray, oblivious to the conversations that were taking place.
‘Ladies and gentleman… I would like to introduce Naqi Okpik. Naqi oversees the scientific programme on the Moat. She’ll be your host for the visit to our project.’
‘Ah, Naqi.’ Amesha Crane leaned over and shook her hand. ‘A pleasure. I just read your papers on information propagation methods in class-three nodes. Erudite.’
‘They were collaborative works,’ Naqi said. ‘I really can’t take too much credit.’
‘Ah, but you can. All of you can. You achieved those findings with the minimum of resources, and you made very creative use of some extremely simplistic numerical methods.’
‘We muddle through,’ Naqi said.
Crane nodded enthusiastically. ‘It must give you a great sense of satisfaction.’
Tak Thonburi said, ‘It’s a philosophy, that’s all. We conduct our science in isolation, and we enjoy only limited communication with other colonies. As a social model it has its disadvantages, but it means we aren’t forever jealous of what they’re achieving on some other world that happens to be a few decades ahead of us because of an accident of history or location. We think that the benefits outweigh the costs.’
‘Well, it seems to work,’ Crane said. ‘You have a remarkably stable society here, Chairman. Verging on the utopian, some might say.’
Tak Thonburi caressed his cowlick. ‘We can’t complain.’
‘Nor can we,’ said the man Naqi recognised as quizzical-faced Simon Matsubara. ‘If you hadn’t enforced this isolation, your own Juggler research would have been as hopelessly compromised as everywhere else.’
‘But the isolation isn’t absolute, is it?’
The voice was quiet, but commanding.
Naqi followed the voice to the speaker. It was Rafael Weir, the man who had been identified as a possible security risk. Of the three who had emerged from Moreau’s shuttle, he was the least remarkable looking, possessing the kind of amorphous face that would allow him to blend in with almost any crowd. Had her attention not been drawn to him, he would have been the last one she noticed. He was not unattractive, but there was nothing particularly striking or charismatic about his looks. According to the security dossier, he had made a number of efforts to break away from the main party of the delegation while they had been visiting research stations. They could have been accidents — one or two other party members had become separated at other times — but it was beginning to look a little too deliberate.
‘No,’ Tak Thonburi answered. ‘We’re not absolute isolationists, or we’d never have given permission for Voice of Evening to assume orbit around Turquoise. But we don’t solicit passing traffic either. Our welcome is as warm as anyone’s, we hope, but we don’t encourage visitors.’
‘Are we the first to visit since your settlement?’ Weir asked.
‘The first starship?’ Tak Thonburi shook his head. ‘No. But it’s been a number of years since the last one.’
‘Which was?’
‘The
‘An amusing coincidence, then,’ Weir said.
Tak Thonburi narrowed his eyes. ‘Coincidence?’
‘The Pelican’s next port of call was Haven, if I’m not mistaken. It was en
Thonburi’s eyes narrowed. He was trying to read Weir and evidently failing. ‘We don’t talk about the Pelican too much. There were technical benefits — vacuum-bladder production methods, information technologies… but there was also a fair bit of unpleasantness. The wounds haven’t entirely healed.’
‘Let’s hope this visit will be remembered more fondly,’ Weir said.
Amesha Crane nodded, fingering one of the items of silver jewellery in her hair. ‘Agreed. All the indications are favourable, at the very least. We’ve arrived at a most auspicious time.’ She turned to Naqi. ‘I find the Moat project fascinating, and I’m sure I speak for the entire Vahishta delegation. I may as well tell you that no one else has attempted anything remotely like it. Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?’
‘We won’t know until we try,’ Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.
‘Fascinating, all the same.’ Crane’s expression was knowing, as if she understood Naqi’s predicament perfectly. ‘I understand that you’re very close to running the first experiment?’
‘Given that it’s taken us twenty years to get this far, yes, we’re close. But we’re still looking at three to four months, maybe longer. It’s not something we want to rush.’
‘That’s a great pity,’ Crane said, turning now to Thonburi. ‘In three to four months we might be on our way. Still, it would have been something to see, wouldn’t it?’
Thonburi leaned towards Naqi. The alcohol on his breath was a fog of cheap vinegar. ‘I suppose there wouldn’t be any chance of accelerating the schedule, would there?’
‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ Naqi said.
‘That’s just too bad,’ said Amesha Crane. Still toying with her jewellery, she turned to the others. ‘But we mustn’t let a little detail like that spoil our visit, must we?’
They returned to the Moat using the Voice of Evening’s shuttle. There was another civic reception to be endured upon arrival, but it was a much smaller affair than the one in Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq. Dr Jotah Sivaraksa was there, of course, and once Naqi had dealt with the business of introducing the party to him she was able to relax for the first time in many hours, melting into the corner of the room and watching the interaction between visitors and locals with a welcome sense of detachment. Naqi was tired and had difficulty keeping her eyes open. She saw everything through a sleepy blur, the delegates surrounding Sivaraksa like pillars of fire, the fabric of their costumes rippling with the slightest movement, reds and russets and chrome yellows dancing like sparks or sheets of flame. Naqi left as soon as she felt it was polite to do so, and when she reached her bed she fell immediately into troubled sleep, dreaming of squadrons of purple-winged angels falling from the skies and of the great giant rising from the depths, clawing the seaweed and kelp of ages from his eyes.
In the morning she awoke without really feeling refreshed. Anaemic light pierced the slats on her window. She was not due to meet the delegates again for another three or four hours, so there was time to turn over and try and catch some proper sleep. But she knew from experience that it would be futile.
She got up. To her surprise, there was a new message on her console from Jotah Sivaraksa. What, she wondered, did he have to say to her that he could not have said at the reception, or later this morning?
She opened the message and read.
‘Sivaraksa,’ she said to herself. ‘Are you insane? It can’t be done.’
The message informed her that there had been a change of plan. The first closure of the sea-doors would be attempted in two days, while the delegates were still on the Moat.
It was pure madness. They were months away from that. Yes, the doors could be closed — the basic machinery for doing that was in place — and yes, the doors would be hermetically tight for at least one hundred hours after closure. But nothing else was ready. The sensitive monitoring equipment, the failsafe sub-systems, the back-ups… None of that would be in place and operational for many weeks. Then there was supposed to be at least six weeks of testing, slowly building up to the event itself…
To do it in two days made no sense at all, except to a politician. At best all they would learn was whether or not the Jugglers had remained inside the Moat when the door was closed. They would learn nothing about how the data flow was terminated, or how the internal connections between the nodes adapted to the loss of contact with the wider ocean.
Naqi swore and hit the console. She wanted to blame Sivaraksa, but she knew that was unfair. Sivaraksa had to keep the politicians happy, or the whole project would be endangered. He was just doing what he had to do, and he almost certainly liked it even less than she did.
Naqi pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and found some coffee in one of the adjoining mess rooms. The Moat
