“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 with a delicate provisional nod of the head. “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 wouldn’t know until we 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 was just hoping 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 farther 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 stirred 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 sense of urgency. They might even send trained swimmers, eager to dive into the sea and open their minds to alien communion. Ready to-as they said- 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 green mucous that had adhered to its ceramic teardrop. All human artifacts 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 more raw than was already the case. “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 hadn’t been lifted. I picked up a few shortwave 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 program 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 program 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 program.”
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 seemed 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.”
