The Revelation Space Collection (451 page)

‘I haven’t given up just yet,’ Naqi said.

He found one last nugget of strength. ‘I knew you wouldn’t. Right to trust you. One thing, Naqi. One thing that might make a difference . . . if it comes to the worst, that is—’

‘Jotah?’

‘Tak Thonburi told me this . . . the most top secret, known only to the Snowflake Council. Arviat, Naqi—’

For a moment she thought she had misheard him, or that he was sliding into delirium. ‘Arviat? The city that sinned against the sea?’

‘It was real,’ Sivaraksa said.

There were a number of lifeboats and emergency service craft stored at the top of near-vertical slipways, a hundred metres above the external sea. She took a small but fast emergency craft with a sealed cockpit, her stomach knotting as the vessel commenced its slide towards the ocean. The boat submerged before resurfacing, boosted up to speed and then deployed ceramic hydrofoils to minimise the contact between the hull and the water. Naqi had no precise heading to follow, but she believed Weir would have followed a reasonably straight line away from the cut, aiming to get as far away from the Moat as possible before the other delegates realised their mistake. It would require only a small deviation from that course to take him to the nearest external node, which was as likely a destination as any.

When she was twenty kilometres from the Moat, Naqi allowed herself a moment to look back. The structure was a thin white line etched on the horizon, the towers and the now-sealed cut faintly visible as interruptions in the line’s smoothness. Quills of dark smoke climbed from a dozen spots along the length of the structure. It was too far for Naqi to be certain that she saw flames licking from the towers, but she considered it likely.

The closest external node appeared over the horizon fifteen minutes later. It was nowhere as impressive as the one that had taken Mina, but it was still a larger, more complex structure than any of the nodes that had formed within the Moat - a major urban megalopolis, perhaps, rather than a moderately sized city. Against the skyline Naqi saw spires and rotundas and coronets of green, bridged by a tracery of elevated tendrils. Sprites were rapidly moving silhouettes. There was motion, but it was largely confined to the flying creatures. The node was not yet showing the frenzied changes she had witnessed within the Moat.

Had Weir gone somewhere else?

She pressed onwards, slowing the boat slightly now that the water was thickening with micro-organisms and it was necessary to steer around the occasional larger floating structure. The boat’s sonar picked out dozens of submerged tendrils converging on the node, suspended just below the surface. The tendrils reached away in all directions, to the limits of the boat’s sonar range. Most would have reached over the horizon, to nodes many hundreds of kilometres away. But it was a topological certainty that some of them had been connected to the nodes inside the Moat. Evidently, Weir’s contagion had never escaped through the cut. Naqi doubted that the doors had closed in time to impede whatever chemical signals were transmitting the fatal message. It was more likely that some latent Juggler self-protection mechanism had cut in, the dying nodes sending emergency termination-of-connection signals that forced the tendrils to sever without human assistance.

Naqi had just decided that she had guessed wrongly about Weir’s plan when she saw a rectilinear furrow gouged right through one of the largest subsidiary structures. The wound was healing itself as she watched - it would be gone in a matter of minutes - but enough remained for her to tell that Weir’s boat must have cleaved through the mass very recently. It made sense. Weir had already demonstrated that he had no interest in preserving the Pattern Jugglers.

With renewed determination, Naqi gunned the boat forward. She no longer worried about inflicting local damage on the floating masses. There was a great deal more at stake than the well-being of a single node.

She felt a warmth on the back of her neck.

At the same instant the sky, sea and floating structures ahead of her pulsed with a cruel brightness. Her own shadow stretched forward ominously. The brightness faded over the next few seconds, and then she dared to look back, half-knowing what she would see.

A mass of hot, roiling gas was climbing into the air from the centre of the node. It tugged a column of matter beneath it, like the knotted and gnarled spinal column of a horribly swollen brain. Against the mushroom cloud she saw the tiny moving speck of the delegates’ shuttle.

A minute later the sound of the explosion reached her, but although it was easily the loudest thing she had ever heard, it was not as deafening as she had expected. The boat lurched; the sea fumed, and then was still again. She assumed that the Moat’s wall had absorbed much of the energy of the blast.

Suddenly fearful that there might be another explosion, Naqi turned back towards the node. At the same instant she saw Weir’s boat, racing perhaps three hundred metres ahead of her. He was beginning to curve and slow as he neared the impassable perimeter of the node. Naqi knew that she did not have time to delay.

That was when Weir saw her. His boat sped up again, arcing hard away. Naqi steered immediately, certain that her boat was faster and that it was now only a matter of time before she had him. A minute later Weir’s boat disappeared around the curve of the node’s perimeter. She might have stood a chance of getting an echo from his hull, but this close to the node all sonar returns were too garbled to be of any use. Naqi steered anyway, hoping that Weir would make the tactical mistake of striking for another node. In open water he stood no chance at all, but perhaps he understood that as well.

She had circumnavigated a third of the node’s perimeter when she caught up with him again. He had not tried to run for it. Instead he had brought the boat to a halt within the comparative shelter of an inlet on the perimeter. He was standing up at the rear of the boat, with something small and dark in his hand.

Naqi slowed her boat as she approached him. She had popped back the canopy before it occurred to her that Weir might be equipped with the same weapons as Crane.

She stood up herself. ‘Weir?’

He smiled. ‘I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I don’t think it could have happened any other way.’

She let this pass. ‘That thing in your hand?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s a weapon, isn’t it?’

She could see it clearly now. It was merely a glass bauble, little larger than a child’s marble. There was something opaque inside it, but she could not tell if it contained fluid or dark crystals.

‘I doubt that a denial would be very plausible at this point.’ He nodded, and she sensed the lifting, partially at least, of some appalling burden. ‘Yes, it’s a weapon. A Juggler killer.’

‘Until today, I’d have said no such thing was possible.’

‘I doubt that it was very easy to synthesise. Countless biological entities have entered their oceans, and none of them have ever brought anything with them that the Jugglers couldn’t assimilate in a harmless fashion. Doubtless some of those entities tried to inflict deliberate harm, if only out of morbid curiosity. None of them succeeded. Of course, you can kill Jugglers by brute force—’ He looked towards the Moat, where the mushroom cloud was dissipating. ‘But that isn’t the point. Not subtle. But this is. It exploits a logical flaw in the Jugglers’ own informational processing algorithms. It’s insidious. And no, humans most certainly didn’t invent it. We’re clever, but we’re not that clever.’

Naqi strove to keep him talking. ‘Who made it, Weir?’

‘The Ultras sold it to us in a presynthesised form. I’ve heard rumours that it was found inside the topmost chamber of a heavily fortified alien structure . . . Another that it was synthesised by a rival group of Jugglers. Who knows? Who cares, even? It does what we ask of it. That’s all that matters.’

‘Please don’t use it, Rafael.’

‘I have to. It’s what I came here to do.’

‘But I thought you all loved the Jugglers.’

His fingers caressed the glass globe. It looked terribly fragile. ‘We?’

‘Crane . . . Her delegates.’

‘They do. But I’m not one of them.’

‘Tell me what this is about, Rafael.’

‘It would be better if you just accepted what I have to do.’

Naqi swallowed. ‘If you kill them, you kill more than just an alien life form. You erase the memory of every sentient creature that’s ever entered the ocean.’

‘Unfortunately, that rather happens to be the point.’

Weir dropped the glass into the sea.

It hit the water, bobbed under and then popped back out again, floating on the surface. The small globe was already immersed in a brackish scum of grey-green micro-organisms. They were beginning to lap higher up the sides of the globe, exploring it. A couple of millimetres of ordinary glass would succumb to Juggler erosion in perhaps thirty minutes . . . But Naqi guessed that this was not ordinary glass, that it was designed to degrade much more rapidly.

She jumped back down into her control seat and shot her boat forward. She came alongside Weir’s boat, trapping the globe between the two craft. Taking desperate care not to nudge the hulls together, she stopped her boat and leaned over as far as she could without falling in. Her fingertips brushed the glass. Maddeningly, she could not quite get a grip on it. She made one last valiant effort and it drifted beyond her reach. Now it was out of her range, no matter how hard she stretched. Weir watched impassively.

Naqi slipped into the water. The layer of Juggler organisms licked her chin and nose, the smell immediate and overwhelming now that she was in such close proximity. Her fear was absolute. It was the first time she had entered the water since Mina’s death.

She caught the globe, taking hold of it with the exquisite care she might have reserved for a rare bird’s egg.

Already the glass had the porous texture of pumice.

She held it up, for Weir to see.

‘I won’t let you do this, Rafael.’

‘I admire your concern.’

‘It’s more than concern. My sister is here. She’s in the ocean. And I won’t let you take her away from me.’

Weir reached inside a pocket and removed another globe.

They sped away from the node in Naqi’s boat. The new globe rested in his hand like a gift. He had not yet dropped it in the sea, although the possibility was only ever an instant away. They were far from any node now, but the globe would be guaranteed to come into contact with Juggler matter sooner or later.

Naqi opened a watertight equipment locker, pushing aside the flare pistol and first-aid kit that lay within. Carefully she placed the globe within, and then watched in horror as the glass immediately cracked and dissolved, releasing its poison: little black irregularly shaped grains like burned sugar. If the boat sank, the locker would eventually be consumed into the ocean, along with its fatal contents. She considered using the flare pistol to incinerate the remains, but there was too much danger of dispersing it at the same time. Perhaps the toxin had a restricted lifespan once it came into contact with air, but that was nothing she could count on.

But Weir had not thrown the globe into sea. Not yet. Something she had said had made him hesitate.

‘Your sister?’

‘You know the story,’ Naqi said. ‘Mina was a conformal. The ocean assimilated her entirely, rather than just recording her neural patterns. It took her as a prize.’

‘And you believe that she’s still present, in some sentient sense?’

‘That’s what I choose to believe, yes. And there’s enough anecdotal evidence from other swimmers that conformals do persist, in a more coherent form than other stored patterns.’

‘I can’t let anecdotal evidence sway me, Naqi. Have the other swimmers specifically reported encounters with Mina?’

‘No . . .’ Naqi said carefully. She was sure that he would see through any lie that she attempted. ‘But they wouldn’t necessarily recognise her if they did.’

‘And you? Did you attempt to swim yourself?’

‘The swimmer corps would never have allowed me.’

‘Not my question. Did you ever swim?’

‘Once,’ Naqi said.

‘And?’

‘It didn’t count. It was the same time that Mina died.’ She paused and then told him all that had happened. ‘We were seeing more sprite activity than we’d ever recorded. It looked like coincidence—’

‘I don’t think it was.’

Naqi said nothing. She waited for Weir to collect his own thoughts, concentrating on the steering of the boat. Open sea lay ahead, but she knew that almost any direction would bring them to a cluster of nodes within a few hours.

‘It began with
Pelican in Impiety,
’ Weir said. ‘A century ago. There was a man from Zion on that ship. During the stopover he descended to the surface of Turquoise and swam in your ocean. He made contact with the Jugglers and then swam again. The second time the experience was even more affecting. On the third occasion, the sea swallowed him. He’d been a conformal, just like your sister. His name was Ormazd.’

‘It means nothing to me.’

‘I assure you that on his homeworld it means a great deal more. Ormazd was a failed tyrant, fleeing a political counter-revolution on Zion. He had murdered and cheated his way to power on Zion, burning his rivals in their houses while they slept. But there’d been a backlash. He got out just before the ring closed around him - him and a handful of his closest allies and devotees. They escaped aboard
Pelican in Impiety
.’