“It doesn’t look as if they’re expecting a gift this time,” Mina said.
Veined tubes and pipes coiled and writhed around each other in constant sinuous motion, making Naqi think of some hugely magnified circuitry formed from plant parts. It was restless living circuitry that never quite settled into one configuration. Now and then chequer-board designs appeared, or intricately interlocking runes. Sharply geometric patterns flickered from point to point, echoed, amplified and subtly iterated at each move. Distinct three-dimensional shapes assumed brief solidity, carved from greenery as if by the deft hand of a topiarist. Naqi glimpsed unsettling anatomies; the warped memories of alien bodies that had once entered the ocean, a million or a billion years ago. Here a three-jointed limb, here the shieldlike curve of an exoskeletal plaque. The head of something that was almost equine melted into a goggling mass of faceted eyes. Fleetingly, a human form danced from the chaos. But only once. Alien swimmers outnumbered human swimmers vastly.
Here were the Pattern Jugglers, Naqi knew. The first explorers had mistaken these remembered forms for indications of actual sentience, thinking that the oceanic mass was a kind of community of intelligences. It was an easy mistake to have made, but it was some way from the truth. These animate shapes were enticements, like the gaudy covers of books. The minds themselves were captured only as frozen traces. The only living intelligence within the ocean lay in its own curatorial system.
To believe anything else was heresy.
The dance of bodies became too rapid to follow. Pastel-coloured lights glowed from deep within the green structure, flickering and stuttering. Naqi thought of lanterns burning from the depths of a forest. Now the edge of the lagoon had become irregular, extending peninsulas toward the centre of the dwindling circle of water, while narrow bays and inlets fissured back into the larger mass of the node. The peninsulas sprouted grasping tendrils, thigh-thick at the trunk but narrowing to the dimensions of plant fronds, and then narrowing further, bifurcating into lacy, fernlike hazes of awesome complexity. They diffracted light like the wings of dragonflies. They were closing over the lagoon, forming a shimmering canopy. Now and then a sprite-or something smaller but equally bright-arced from one bank of the lagoon to another. Brighter things moved through the water like questing fish. Microscopic organisms were detaching from the larger fronds and tendrils, swarming in purposeful clouds. They batted against her skin, against her eyelids. Every breath that she took made her cough. The taste of the Pattern Jugglers was sour and medicinal. They were in her, invading her body.
She panicked. It was as if a tiny switch had flipped in her mind. Suddenly all other concerns melted away. She had to get out of the lagoon immediately, no matter what Mina would think of her.
Thrashing more than swimming, Naqi tried to push herself toward the raft. But as soon as the panic reaction had kicked in she had felt something else slide over her. It was not so much paralysis as an immense sense of inertia. Moving, even breathing, became problematic. The boat was impossibly distant. She was no longer capable of treading water. She felt heavy, and when she looked down she saw that a green haze enveloped the parts of her body that she could see above water. The organisms were adhering to the fabric of her wetsuit.
“Mina…” she called. “Mina!”
But Mina only looked at her. Naqi sensed that her sister was experiencing the same sort of paralysis. Mina’s movements had become languid, and yet instead of panic what Naqi saw on her face was profound resignation and acceptance. It was dangerously close to serenity.
Mina wasn’t frightened at all.
The patterns on her neck were flaring vividly. Her eyes were closed. Already the organisms had begun to attack the fabric of her suit, stripping it away from her flesh. Naqi could feel the same thing happening to her own suit. There was no pain, for the organisms stopped short of attacking her skin. With a mighty effort she hoisted her forearm from the water, studying the juxtaposition of pale flesh and dissolving black fabric. Her fingers were as stiff as iron.
But-and Naqi clung to this-the ocean recognised the sanctity of organisms, or at least thinking organisms. Strange things might happen to people who swam with the Jugglers, things that might be difficult to distinguish from death or near death. But people always emerged afterward, changed perhaps, but essentially whole. No matter what happened now, they would survive. The Jugglers always returned those who swam with them, and even when they did effect changes they were seldom permanent.
Except, of course, for those who didn’t return.
No, Naqi told herself. What they were doing was foolish, and might perhaps destroy their careers. But they would survive. Mina had flagged high on the conformality index when she had applied to join the swimmer corps, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily at risk. Conformality merely implied a rare connection with the ocean. It verged on the glamorous.
Now Mina was going under. She had stopped moving entirely. Her eyes were blankly ecstatic.
Naqi wanted to resist that same impulse to submission. But the strength had flown away from her. She felt herself commence the same descent. The water closed over her mouth, then her eyes, and in a moment she was under. She felt herself a toppled statue sliding toward the seabed. Her fear reached a crescendo and then passed. She was not drowning. The froth of green organisms had forced itself down her throat, down her nasal passage. She felt no fright. There was nothing except a profound feeling that this was what she had been born to do.
Naqi knew what was happening, what was going to happen. She had studied enough reports on swimmer missions. The tiny organisms were infiltrating her entire body, creeping into her lungs and bloodstream. They were keeping her alive, while at the same time flooding her with chemical bliss. Droves of the same tiny creatures were seeking routes to her brain, inching along the optic nerve, the aural nerve, or crossing the blood-brain barrier itself. They were laying tiny threads behind them, fibres that extended back into the larger mass of organisms suspended in the water around her. In turn, these organisms established data-carrying channels back into the primary mass of the node… And the node itself was connected to other nodes, both chemically and via the packet-carrying sprites. The green threads bound Naqi to the entire ocean. It might take hours for a signal to reach her mind from halfway around Turquoise, but it didn’t matter. She was beginning to think on Juggler time, her own thought processes seeming pointlessly quick, like the motion of bees.
She sensed herself becoming vaster.
She was no longer just a pale, hard-edged thing labelled Naqi, suspended in the lagoon like a dying starfish. Her sense of self was rushing out toward the horizon in all directions, encompassing first the node and then the empty oceanic waters around it. She couldn’t say precisely how this information was reaching her. It wasn’t through visual imagery, but more an intensely detailed spatial awareness. It was as if spatial awareness had suddenly become her most vital sense.
She supposed this was what swimmers meant when they spoke of kenning.
She kenned the presence of other nodes over the horizon, their chemical signals flooding her mind, each unique, each bewilderingly rich in information. It was like hearing the roar of a hundred crowds. And at the same time she kenned the ocean depths, the cold fathoms of water beneath the node, the life-giving warmth of the crustal vents. Closer, too, she kenned Mina. They were two neighbouring galaxies in a sea of strangeness. Mina’s own thoughts were bleeding into the sea, into Naqi’s mind, and in them Naqi felt the reflected echo of her own thoughts, picked up by Mina…