Mina sighed. “I was tempted, you know. I just didn’t want you to see how tempted I was, or else you’d have found a way to convince me.”
“I’m that persuasive?”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, sis. I know I never would.” Mina paused and took back the swab. “I’ll finish this. Can you handle the sweep program?”
Naqi smiled. She felt better now. The tension between them would still take a little while to lift, but at least things were easier now. Mina was right about something else: they were best friends, not just sisters.
“I’ll handle it,” Naqi said.
Naqi stepped through the hermetic curtain into the air-conditioned cool of the gondola. She closed the door, rubbed her eyes, and then sat down at the navigator’s station. The airship had flown itself automatically from Umingmaktok, adjusting its course to take cunning advantage of jet streams and weather fronts. Now it was in hovering mode: once or twice a minute the electrically driven motors purred, stabilising the craft against gusts of wind generated by the microclimate above the Juggler node. Naqi called up the current avionics program, a menu of options appearing on a flat screen. The options quivered; Naqi thumped the screen with the back of her hand until the display behaved itself. Then she scrolled down through the other flight sequences, but there was no preprogrammed spiral loaded into the current avionics suite. Naqi rummaged around in the background files, but there was nothing to help her there either. She was about to start hacking something together-at a push it would take her half an hour to assemble a routine-when she remembered that she had once backed up some earlier avionics files onto the fan. She had no idea if they were still there, or even if there was anything useful among the cache, but it was probably worth taking the time to find out. The fan lay closed on a bench, where Mina must have left it after she verified that the blackout was still in force.
Naqi grabbed the fan and spread it open across her lap. To her surprise, it was still active: instead of the usual watercolour patterns the display showed the messages she had been scrolling through earlier.
She looked closer and frowned. These were not her messages at all. She was looking at the messages Mina had copied onto the fan during the night. At this realisation Naqi felt an immediate prickle of guilt. She knew that she should snap the fan shut, or at the very least close her sister’s mail and delve into her own area of the fan. But she did neither of those things. Telling herself that it was only what anyone else would have done, she accessed the final message in the list and examined its incoming time-stamp. To within a few minutes, it had arrived at the same time as the final message Naqi had received.
Mina had been telling the truth when she said that the blackout was continuing.
Naqi glanced up. Through the window of the gondola she could see the back of her sister’s head, bobbing up and down as she checked winches along the side.
Naqi looked at the body of the message. It was nothing remarkable, just an automated circular from one of the Juggler special-interest groups. Something about neurotransmitter chemistry.
She exited the circular, getting back to the list of incoming messages. She told herself that she had done nothing shameful so far. If she closed Mina’s mail now, she would have nothing to feel guilty about.
But a name she recognized jumped out at her from the list of messages: Dr. Jotah Sivaraksa, manager of the Moat project. The man she had met in Umingmaktok, glowing with renewed vitality after his yearly worm change. What could Mina possibly want with Sivaraksa?
She opened the message, read it.
It was exactly as she had feared, and yet not dared to believe.
Sivaraksa was responding to Mina’s request to work on the Moat. The tone of the message was conversational, in stark contrast to the businesslike response Naqi had received. Sivaraksa informed her sister that her request had been appraised favourably, and that while there were still one or two other candidates to be considered, the expectation was that Mina would emerge as the most convincing applicant. Even if this turned out not to be the case, Sivaraksa continued-and that outcome was not thought very likely-Mina’s name would be at the top of the list when further vacancies became available. In short, she was more or less guaranteed a chance to work on the Moat within the year.
Naqi read the message again, just in case there was some highly subtle detail that threw the entire thing into a different, more benign light.
Then she snapped shut the fan with a sense of profound fury. She placed it back where it was, exactly as it had been.
Mina pushed her head through the hermetic curtain.
“How’s it coming along?”
“Fine…” Naqi said. Her voice sounded drained of emotion even to herself.
“Got that routine cobbled together?”
“Coming along,” Naqi said.
“Something the matter?”
“No…” Naqi forced a smile. “No. Just working through the details. Have it ready in a few minutes.”
“Good. Can’t wait to start the sweep. We’re going to get some beautiful data, sis. And I think this is going to be a significant node. Maybe the largest this season. Aren’t you glad it came our way?”
“Thrilled,” Naqi said, before returning to her work.
Thirty specialised probes hung on telemetric cables from the underside of the gondola, dangling like the venom-tipped stingers of some grotesque aerial jellyfish. The probes sniffed the air metres above the Juggler biomass, or skimmed the fuzzy green surface of the formation. Weighted plumb lines penetrated to the sea beneath the raff, sipping the organism-infested depths dozens of metres under the node. Radar mapped larger structures embedded within the node-dense kernels of compacted biomass, or huge cavities and tubes of implacable function-while sonar graphed the topology of the many sinewy organic cables which plunged into darkness, umbilicals anchoring the node to the seabed. Smaller nodes drew most of their energy from sunlight and the breakdown of sugars and fats in the sea’s other floating microorganisms but the larger formations-which had a vastly higher information-processing burden--needed to tap belching aquatic fissures, active rifts in the ocean bed kilometres under the waves. Cold water was pumped down each umbilical by peristaltic compression waves, heated by being circulated in the superheated thermal environment of the underwater volcanoes, and then pumped back to the surface.
In all this sensing activity, remarkably little physical harm was done to the extended organism itself. The biomass sensed the approach of the probes and rearranged itself so that they passed through with little obstruction, even those scything lines that reached into the water. Energy was obviously being consumed to avoid the organism sustaining damage, and by implication the measurements must therefore have had some effect on the node’s information processing efficiency. The effect was likely to be small, however, and since the node was already subject to constant changes in its architecture-some probably intentional, and some probably forced on it by other factors in its environment-there appeared to be little point in worrying about the harm caused by the human investigators. Ultimately, so much was still guesswork. Although the swimmer teams had learned a great deal about the Pattern Jugglers’ encoded information, almost everything else about them-how and why they stored the neural patterns, and to what extent the patterns were subject to subsequent postprocessing-remained unknown. And those were merely the immediate questions. Beyond that were the real mysteries, which everyone wanted to solve, but were simply beyond the scope of immediate academic study. What they would learn today could not be expected to shed any light on those profundities. A single data point-even a single clutch of measurements-could not usually prove or disprove anything. But nonetheless it might later turn out to play a vital role in some chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.
The spiral sweep continued uneventfully, the airship chugging around in a gently widening circle. Morning shifted to early afternoon, and then the sun began to climb down toward the horizon, bleeding pale orange into the sky through soft-edged cracks in the cloud cover. For hours Naqi and Mina studied the incoming results, the ever- sharper scans of the node appearing on screens throughout the gondola. They discussed the results cordially enough, but Naqi could not stop thinking about Mina’s betrayal. She took a spiteful pleasure in testing the extent to which her sister would lie, deliberately forcing the conversation around to Dr. Sivaraksa and the project he steered.
