Naqi read the message again, just in case there was some highly subtle detail that threw the entire thing into a different, more benign light.
Then she snapped shut the fan with a sense of profound fury. She placed it back where it was, exactly as it had been.
Mina pushed her head through the hermetic curtain.
‘How’s it coming along?’
‘Fine,’ Naqi said. Her voice sounded drained of emotion even to herself. She felt stunned and mute. Mina would call her a hypocrite were she to object to her sister having applied for exactly the same job she had… but there was more to it than that. Naqi had never been as openly critical of the Moat project as her sister. By contrast, Mina had never missed a chance to denounce both the project and the personalities behind it.
Now that was real hypocrisy.
‘Got that routine cobbled together?’
‘Coming along,’ Naqi said.
‘Something the matter?’
‘No,’ Naqi forced a smile, ‘no. Just working through the details. Have it ready in a few minutes.’
‘Good. Can’t wait to start the sweep. We’re going to get some beautiful data, sis. And I think this is going to be a significant node. Maybe the largest this season. Aren’t you glad it came our way?’
‘Thrilled,’ Naqi said, before returning to her work.
Thirty specialised probes hung on telemetric cables from the underside of the gondola, dangling like the venom-tipped stingers of some grotesque aerial jellyfish. The probes sniffed the air metres above the Juggler biomass, or skimmed the fuzzy green surface of the formation. Weighted plumb lines penetrated to the sea beneath the raft, sipping the organism-infested depths dozens of metres under the node. Radar mapped larger structures embedded within the node — dense kernels of compacted biomass, or huge cavities and tubes of inscrutable function — while sonar graphed the topology of the many sinewy organic cables which plunged into darkness, umbilicals anchoring the node to the seabed. Smaller nodes drew most of their energy from sunlight and the breakdown of sugars and fats in the sea’s other floating micro-organisms but the larger formations, which had a vastly higher information-processing burden, needed to tap belching aquatic fissures, active rifts in the ocean bed kilometres under the waves. Cold water was pumped down each umbilical by peristaltic compression waves, heated by being circulated in the superheated thermal environment of the underwater volcanoes, and then pumped back to the surface.
In all this sensing activity, remarkably little physical harm was done to the extended organism itself. The biomass sensed the approach of the probes and rearranged itself so that they passed through with little obstruction, even those scything lines that reached into the water. Energy was obviously being consumed to avoid the organism sustaining damage, and by implication the measurements must therefore have had some effect on the node’s information-processing efficiency. The effect was likely to be small, however, and since the node was already subject to constant changes in its architecture — some probably intentional, and some probably forced on it by other factors in its environment — there appeared to be little point in worrying about the harm caused by the human investigators. Ultimately, so much was still guesswork. Although the swimmer teams had learned a great deal about the Pattern Jugglers’ encoded information, almost everything else about them — how and why they stored the neural patterns, and to what extent the patterns were subject to subsequent postprocessing — remained unknown. And those were merely the immediate questions. Beyond that were the real mysteries, which everyone wanted to solve, but right now they were simply beyond the scope of possible academic study. What they would learn today could not be expected to shed any light on those profundities. A single data point — even a single clutch of measurements — could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.
The spiral sweep continued uneventfully, the airship chugging around in a gently widening circle. Morning shifted to early afternoon, and then the sun began to climb down towards the horizon, bleeding pale orange into the sky through soft-edged cracks in the cloud cover. For hours Naqi and Mina studied the incoming results, the ever-sharper scans of the node appearing on screens throughout the gondola. They discussed the results cordially enough, but Naqi could not stop thinking about Mina’s betrayal. She took a spiteful pleasure in testing the extent to which her sister would lie, deliberately forcing the conversation around to Dr Sivaraksa and the project he steered.
‘I hope I don’t end up like one of those deadwood bureaucrats,’ Naqi said, when they were discussing the way their careers might evolve. ‘You know, like Sivaraksa.’ She observed Mina pointedly, yet giving nothing away. ‘I read some of his old papers; he used to be pretty good once. But now look at him.’
‘It’s easy to say that,’ Mina said, ‘but I bet he doesn’t like being away from the front line any more than we would. But someone has to manage these big projects. Wouldn’t you rather it was someone who’d at least been a scientist?’
‘You sound like you’re defending him. Next you’ll be telling me you think the Moat is a good idea.’
‘I’m not defending Sivaraksa,’ Mina said. ‘I’m just saying—’ She eyed her sister with a sudden glimmer of suspicion. Had she guessed that Naqi knew? ‘Never mind. Sivaraksa can fight his own battles. We’ve got work to do.’
‘Anyone would think you were changing the subject,’ Naqi said. But Mina was already on her way out of the gondola to check the equipment again.
At dusk the airship arrived at the perimeter of the node, completed one orbit, then began to track inwards again. As it passed over the parts of the node previously mapped, time-dependent changes were highlighted on the displays: arcs and bands of red superimposed against the lime and turquoise false-colour of the mapped structures. Most of the alterations were minor: a chamber opening here or closing there, or a small alteration in the network topology to ease a bottleneck between the lumpy subnodes dotted around the floating island. Other changes were more mysterious in function, but conformed to other studies. They were studied at enhanced resolution, the data prioritised and logged.
It looked as if the node was large, but in no way unusual.
Then night came, as swiftly as it always did at those latitudes. Mina and Naqi took turns, one sleeping for two- or three-hour stretches while the other kept an eye on the readouts. During a lull Naqi climbed up onto the top of the airship and tried the antenna again, and for a moment was gladdened when she saw that a new message had arrived. But the message itself turned out to be a statement from the Snowflake Council stating that the blackout on civilian messages would continue for at least another two days, until the current ‘crisis’ was over. There were allusions to civil disturbances in two cities, with curfews being imposed, and imperatives to ignore all unofficial news sources concerning the nature of the approaching ship.
Naqi wasn’t surprised that there was trouble, though the extent of it took her aback. Her instincts were to believe the government line. The problem, from the government’s point of view at least, was that nothing was yet known for certain about the nature of the ship, and so by being truthful they ended up sounding like they were keeping something back. They would have been far better off making up a plausible lie, which could be gently moulded towards accuracy as time passed.