The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“I doubt that it was very easy to synthesize. Countless biological entities have entered their oceans, and none of them have ever brought anything with them that the Juggler 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 glanced toward 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 presynthesized form. I’ve heard rumours that it was found inside the topmost chamber of a heavily fortified alien structure… Another that it was synthesized 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 gray-green microorganisms. 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 inside, and then watched in horror as the glass immediately cracked and dissolved, releasing its poison: little black irregularly shaped grains like burnt 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 seemed too much danger of dispersing it at the same time. Perhaps the toxin had a restricted life span once it came into contact with air, but that was nothing she could count on.

But Weir had not thrown the third globe into the 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?”