The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Naqi understood what it was like for Mina. Her sister’s memories were rapturous. She might only have sensed the passing of hours or days, but that belied the richness of her experience since merging with the ocean. She had exchanged experience with countless alien minds, drinking in entire histories beyond normal human comprehension. And in that moment of sharing, Naqi appreciated something of the reason for her sister having been taken in the first place. Conformals were the ocean’s way of managing itself. Now and then the maintenance of the vaster archive of static minds required stewardship-the drawing in of independent intelligences. Mina had been selected and utilised, and given rewards beyond imagining for her efforts. The ocean had tapped the structure of her intelligence at a subconscious level. Only now and then had she ever felt that she was being directly petitioned on a matter of importance.

But Ormazd’s mind…?

Mina had seen Naqi’s memories now. She would know exactly what was at stake, and she would know exactly what that mind represented.

I was always aware of him. He wasn’t always there-he liked to hide himself - but even when he was absent, he left a shadow of himself. I even think he might be the reason the ocean took me as a conformal. It sensed a coming crisis. It knew Ormazd had something to do with it. It had made a terrible mistake by swallowing him. So it reached out for new allies, minds it could trust.

Minds like Mina, Naqi thought. In that instant she did not know whether to admire the Pattern Jugglers or detest them for their heartlessness.

Ormazd was contaminating it?

His influence was strong. His force of personality was a kind of poison in its own right. The Pattern Jugglers knew that, I think.

Why couldn’t they just eject his patterns?

They couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way. The sea is a storage medium, but it has no self-censoring facility. If the individual minds detect a malign presence, they can resist it… But Ormazd’s mind is human. There aren’t enough of us here to make a difference, Naqi. The other minds are too alien to recognise Ormazd for what he is. They just see a sentience.

Who made the Pattern Jugglers, Mina? Answer me that, will you?

She sensed Mina’s amusement.

Even the Jugglers don’t know that, Naqi. Or why.

You have to help us, Mina. You have to communicate the urgency of this to the rest of the ocean.

I’m one mind among many, Naqi. One voice in the chorus.

You still have to find a way. Please, Mina. Understand this, if nothing else. You could die. You all could die. I lost you once, but now I know you never really went away. I don’t want to have to lose you again, for good.

You didn’t lose me, Naqi. I lost you.

She hauled herself from the water. Weir was waiting where she had left him, with the intact globe still resting in his hand. The daylight shadows had moved a little, but not as much as she had feared. She made eye contact with Weir, wordlessly communicating a question.

“The shuttle’s come closer. It’s flown over the node twice while you were under. I think I need to do this, Naqi.”

He had the globe between thumb and forefinger, ready to drop it into the water.

She was shivering. Naqi pulled on her shorts and shirt, but she felt just as cold afterwards. The fungal marks were shimmering intensely, seeming to hover above her skin. If anything they were shining more furiously than before she had swum. Naqi did not doubt that if she had lingered-if she had stayed with Mina-she would have become a conformal as well. It had always been in her, but it was only now that her time had come.

“Please wait,” Naqi said, her own voice sounding pathetic and childlike. “Please wait, Rafael.”

“There it is again.”

The shuttle was a fleck of white sliding over the top of the nearest wall of Juggler biomass. It was five or six kilometres away, much closer than the last time Naqi had seen it. Now it came to a sudden sharp halt, hovering above the surface of the ocean as if it had found something of particular interest.

“Do you think it knows we’re here?”

“It suspects something,” Weir said. The globe rolled between his fingers.

“Look,” Naqi said.

The shuttle was still hovering. Naqi stood up to get a better view, nervous of making herself visible but desperately curious. Something was happening. She knew something was happening.