The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

The node, like all nodes, had always shown a rich surface topology; fused hummocks and tendrils; fabulous domes and minarets and helter-skelters of organised biomass, linked and entangled by a telegraphic system of draping aerial tendrils. In any instant it resembled a human city-or, more properly, a fairy-tale human city-that had been efficiently smothered in green moss. The bright moving motes of sprites dodged through the interstices, the portholes and arches of the urban mass. The metropolitan structure only hinted at the node’s byzantine interior architecture, and much of that could only be glimpsed or implied.

But this node was like a city going insane. It was accelerating, running through cycles of urban renewal and redesign with indecent haste. Structures were evolving before Naqi’s eyes. She had seen change this rapid just before Mina was taken, but normally those kinds of changes happened too slowly to be seen at all, like the daily movement of shadows.

The throbbing had decreased, but the flickering change was now throwing out a steady, warm, malodorous breeze. And when she stopped the boat-she dared come no closer now-Naqi heard the node. It was like the whisper of a billion forest leaves presaging a summer storm.

Whatever was happening here, it was about to become catastrophic.

Some fundamental organisation had been lost. The changes were happening too quickly, with too little central coordination. Tendrils thrashed like whips, unable to connect to anything. They flailed against each other. Structures were forming and collapsing. The node was fracturing, so that there were three, four, perhaps five distinct cores of flickering growth. As soon as she had the measure of it, the process shifted it all. Meagre light flickered within the epileptic mass. Sprites swarmed in confused flight patterns, orbiting mindlessly between foci. The sound of the node had become a distant shriek.

“It’s dying…” Naqi breathed.

Weir had done something to it. What, she couldn’t guess. But this could not be a coincidence.

The shrieking died down.

The breeze ceased.

The node had stopped its convulsions. She looked at it, hoping against hope that perhaps it had overcome whatever destabilising influence Weir had introduced. The structures were still misshapen, there was still an impression of incoherence, but the city was inert. The cycling motion of the sprites slowed, and a few of them dropped down into the mass, as if to roost.

A calm had descended.

Then Naqi heard another sound. It was lower than anything she had heard before-almost subsonic. It sounded less like thunder than like a very distant, very heated conversation.

It was coming from the approximate centre of the node.

She watched as a smooth green mound rose from the centre of the node, resembling a flattened hemisphere. It grew larger by the second, assimilating the malformed structures with quiet indifference. They disappeared into the surface of the mound as if into a wall of fog, but they did not emerge again. The mound only increased its size, rumbling toward Naqi. The entire mass of the node was changing into a single undifferentiated mass.

“Jotah…” she said.

“We see it, Naqi. We see it but we don’t understand it.”

“Weir must have used some kind of… weapon against it,” she said.

“We don’t know that he’s harmed it… He might just have precipitated a change to a state we haven’t documented.”

“That still makes it a weapon in my book. I’m scared, Jotah.”

“You think I’m not?”

Around her the sea was changing. She had forgotten about the submerged tendrils that connected the nodes. They were as thick as hawsers, and now they were writhing and thrashing just beneath the surface of the water. Green-tinged spume lifted into the air. It was as if unseen aquatic monsters were wrestling, locked in some dire, to-the-death contest.

“Naqi… We’re seeing changes in the closest of the two remaining nodes.”

“No,” she said, as if denying it would make any difference.

“I’m sorry…”

“Where is Weir?”

“We’ve lost him. There’s too much surface disturbance.”

She realised then what had to be done. The thought arrived in her head with a crashing urgency.

“Jotah… You have to close the sea-doors. Now. Immediately. Before whatever Weir’s unleashed has a chance to reach open ocean. That also happens to be Weir’s only escape route.”

Sivaraksa, to his credit, did not argue. “Yes. You’re right. I’ll start closure. But it will take quite a few minutes…”

“I know, Jotah!”

She cursed herself for not having thought of this sooner, and cursed Sivaraksa for the same error. But she could hardly blame either of them. Closure had never been something to take lightly. A few hours ago it had been an event months in the future-an experiment to test the willingness of the Jugglers to cooperate with human plans. Now it had turned into an emergency amputation, something to be done with brutal haste.