Waves crashed on the shingle and rocks of the shore to either side of her in great sighing, soughing intakings of what sounded like the breath of some great sea creature, a gathering, deepening sound that ended in the small moment of half-silence before each great wave fell and burst against the tumbled, growling slope of rocks and stones, pushing and pulling and rolling the giant glistening pebbles in thudding concussions of water forcing its way amongst their spaces while the rocks slid and smacked and cracked against each other.
Directly in front of her, where there was a raised shelf of rock just under the surface of the sea, the waves breaking on the shallower slope in front of her were smaller, almost friendlier, and the main force of the grumbling, swelling ocean was met fifty metres out at a rough semicircle marked by a line of frothing surf.
She clasped her hands palm up on her lap, beneath the bulge of her belly, and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, the ozone and the brine sharp in her nostrils, connecting her to the sea's salty restlessness, making her, in her mind, again part of its great fluid coalescing of constancy and changefulness, imbuing her thoughts with something of that heaving, sheltering vastness, that world-cleaving cradle of layered, night-making depth.
Inside her mind, in the semi-trance she now assumed, she stepped smilingly down through her own fluid layers of protection and conformation, to where her baby lay, healthy and growing, half awake, half asleep, wholly beautiful.
Her own genetically altered body gently interrogated the placental processes protecting the joined but subtly different chemistries and inheritance of her child's body from her own immune system and carefully, fairly managing the otherwise selfishly voracious demands the baby made upon her body's resources of blood, sugars, proteins, minerals and energy.
The temptation was always to tamper, to fiddle with the settings that regulated everything, as though by such meddling one proved how carefully painstaking and watchful one was being, but she always resisted, content that there were no warning signs, no notice that some imbalance was threatening either her health or that of the fetus and happy to leave the body's own systemic wisdom to prevail over the brain's desire to intervene.
Shifting the focus of her concentration, she was able to use another designed-in sense no creature from any part of her typically distributed Cultural inheritance had ever possessed to look upon her soon-to-be child, modelling its shape in her mind from the information provided by a subset of specialised organisms swimming in the as yet unbroken water surrounding the fetus. She saw it; hunched and curled in an orbed spectrum of smooth pinks, crouched round its umbilical link with her as though it was concentrating on its supply of blood, trying to increase its flow-rate or nutritional saturation.
She marvelled at it, as she always did; at its bulbously headed beauty, at its strange air of blankly formless intensity. She counted its fingers and toes, inspected the tightly closed eyelids, smiled at the tiny budded cleft that spoke of the cells" unprompted selection of congenital femaleness. Half her, half something strange and foreign. A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn would be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.
Reassured that all was well, she left the dimly aware being to continue its purposeful, unthinking growth, and returned to the part of the real world where she was sitting on the pebbled beach and the waves fell loud and foaming amongst the tumbled, rumbling rocks.
Byr was there when she opened her eyes, standing knee-deep in the small waves just in front of her, wet-suited, golden hair damply straggled in long ringlets, face dark against the display of ruddy sunset behind, found just in the act of taking off the suit's face-mask.
"Evening," she said, smiling.
Byr nodded and splashed up out of the water, sitting down beside her and putting an arm round her. "You okay?"
She held the fingers of the hand over her shoulder. "Both fine," she said. "And the gang?"
Byr laughed, peeling off the suit's feet to reveal wrinkled pink-brown toes. "Sk'ilip'k" has decided he likes the idea of walking on land; says he's ashamed his ancestors went out of the ocean and then went back in again as if the air was too cold. He wants us to make him a walking machine. The others think he's crazy, though there is some support for the idea of them all somehow going flying together. I left them a couple more screens and increased some of their access to the flight archives. They gave me this; for you."
Byr handed her something from the suit's side pouch.
"Oh; thank you." She put the small figurine in one palm and turned it over carefully with her fingers, inspecting it by the fading red light of the day's end. It was beautiful, worked out of some soft stone to perfectly resemble their idea of what they thought a human ought to look like; naturally flippered feet, legs joined to the knees, body fatter, shoulders slender, neck thicker, head narrower, hairless. It did look like her; the face, for all that it was distorted, bore a distinct resemblance. Probably G'Istig'tk't's work; there was a delicacy of line and a certain humour about the figurine's facial expression that spoke to her of the old female's personality. She held the little figure up in front of Byr. "Think it looks like me?"
"Well, you're certainly getting that fat."
"Oh!" she said, slapping Byr lightly on the shoulder. She glanced down at her lap, reaching to pat her belly. "I think you're starting to show yourself, at last," she said.
Byr smiled, her face still freckled with droplets of water, catching the dying light. She looked down, holding Dajeil's hand, patting her belly. "Na," she said, rising to her feet. She held out a hand to Dajeil and glanced round to the tower. "You coming in or are you going to sit around communing with the ocean swell all evening? We've got guests, remember?"
She took a breath to say something, then held up her hand. Byr helped pull her up; she felt suddenly heavy, clumsy and… unwieldy. Her back hurt dully. "Yes, let's go in, eh?"
They turned towards the lonely tower.
9. Unacceptable Behaviour
I
The Excession's links with the two regions of the energy grid just fell away, twin collapsing pinnacles of fluted skein fabric sinking back into the grid like idealised renderings of some spent explosion at sea. Both layers of the grid oscillated for a few moments, again like some abstractly perfect liquid, then lay still. The waves produced on the grid surfaces damped quickly to nothing, absorbed. The Excession floated free on the skein of real space, otherwise as enigmatic as ever.
There was, for a while, silence between the three watching ships.
Eventually, the Sober Counsel asked, ~… Is that it?
— So it would appear, the Fate Amenable To Change replied. It felt terrified, elated, disappointed, all at once. Terrified to be in the presence of something that could do what it had just observed, elated to have witnessed it and taken the measurements it had — there were data here, in the velocity of the skein-grid collapse, in the apparent viscosity of the grid's reaction to the links" decoupling — that would fuel genuinely, utterly original science — and disappointed because it had a sneaking feeling that that was it. The Excession was going to sit here like this for a while, still doing nothing. Seemingly endless boredom, instants of blinding terror… endless boredom again. With the Excession around you didn't need a war.
The Fate Amenable To Change started relaying all the data it had collected on the grid-skein links" collapse to a variety of other ships, without even collating it properly first. Get it out of this one location first, just in case. Another part of its Mind was thinking about it, though.