The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Naqi stepped out, back into the hectic corridors and office spaces of the project building. It felt distinctly odd to be back on absolutely firm ground. Although one was seldom aware of it, Umingmaktok was never quite still, no snowflake city or airship ever was. But she would get used to it; in a few hours she would be immersed in her work, having to think of a dozen different things at once, finessing solution pathways, balancing budgets against quality, dealing with personality clashes and minor turf wars, and perhaps-if she was very lucky-managing an hour or two of pure research. Aside from the science none of it was particularly challenging, but it kept her mind off other things. And after a few days of that, the arrival of the visitors would begin to seem like a bizarre, irrelevant interlude in an otherwise monotonous dream. She supposed that two years ago she would have been grateful for that. Life could indeed continue much as she had always imagined it would.

But when she arrived at her office there was a message from Dr. Sivaraksa. He needed to speak to her urgently.

Dr. Jotah Sivaraksa’s office on the Moat was a good deal less spacious than his quarters in Umingmaktok, but the view was superb. His accommodation was perched halfway up one of the towers that flanked the cut through the Moat, buttressed out from the main mass of prefabricated modules like a partially opened desk drawer. Dr. Sivaraksa was writing notes when she arrived. For long moments Naqi lingered at the sloping window, watching the construction activity hundreds of metres below. Railed machines and helmeted workers toiled on the flat upper surface of the Moat, moving raw materials and equipment to the assembly sites. Above, the sky was a perfect cobalt blue, marred now and then by the passing, green-stained hull of a cargo dirigible. The sea beyond the Moat had the dimpled texture of expensive leather.

Dr. Sivaraksa cleared his throat, and when Naqi turned, he gestured at the vacant seat on the opposite side of his desk.

“Life treating you well?”

“Can’t complain, sir.”

“And work?”

“No particular problems that I’m aware of.”

“Good. Good.” Sivaraksa made a quick, cursive annotation in the notebook he had opened on his desk, then slid it beneath the smoky gray cube of a paperweight. “How long has it been now?”

“Since what, sir?”

“Since your sister… Since Mina…” He seemed unable to complete the sentence, substituting a spiralling gesture made with his index finger. His finely boned hands were marbled with veins of olive green.

Naqi eased into her seat. “Two years, sir.”

“And you’re… over it?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say I’m over it, no. But life goes on, like they say. Actually I was hoping…” Naqi had been about to tell him how she had imagined the arrival of the visitors would close that chapter. But she doubted she would be able to convey her feelings in a way Dr. Sivaraksa would understand. “Well, I was hoping I’d have put it all behind me by now.”

“I knew another conformal, you know. Fellow from Gjoa. Made it into the elite swimmer corps before anyone had the foggiest idea…”

“It’s never been proven that Mina was conformal, sir.”

“No, but the signs were there, weren’t they? To one degree or another we’re all subject to symbolic invasion by the ocean’s microorganisms. But conformals show an unusual degree of susceptibility. On one hand it’s as if their own bodies actively invite the invasion, shutting down the usual inflammatory or foreign cell rejection mechanisms. On the other, the ocean seems to tailor its messengers for maximum effectiveness, as if the Jugglers have selected a specific target they wish to absorb. Mina had very strong fungal patterns, did she not?”

“I’ve seen worse.” Naqi said, which was not entirely a lie.

“But not, I suspect, in anyone who ever attempted to commune. I understand you had ambitions to join the swimmer corps yourself?”

“Before all that happened.”

“I understand. And now?”

Naqi had never told anyone that she had joined Mina in the swimming incident. The truth was that even if she had not been present at the time of Mina’s death, her encounter with the rogue mind would have put her off entering the ocean for life.

“It isn’t for me. That’s all.”

Jotah Sivaraksa nodded gravely. “A wise choice. Aptitude or not, you’d have almost certainly been filtered out of the swimmer corps. A direct genetic connection to a conformal-even an unproven conformal-would be too much of a risk.”

“That’s what I assumed, sir.”

“Does it… trouble you, Naqi?”

She was wearying of this. She had work to do-deadlines to meet that Sivaraksa himself had imposed.

“Does what trouble me?”

He nodded at the sea. Now that the play of light had shifted minutely, it looked less like dimpled leather than a sheet of beaten bronze. “The thought that Mina might still be out there… in some sense.”

“It might trouble me if I were a swimmer, sir. Other than that… No. I can’t say that it does. My sister died. That’s all that mattered.”