The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

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.”

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.