Mina rose after midnight to begin her shift. Naqi went to sleep and dreamed fitfully, seeing in her mind’s eye red smears and bars hovering against amorphous green. She had been staring at the readouts too intently, for too many hours.
Mina woke her excitedly before dawn.
‘Now I’m the one with the news,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Come and see for yourself.’
Naqi rose from her hammock, neither rested nor enthusiastic.
In the dim light of the cabin Mina’s fungal patterns shone with peculiar intensity: abstract detached shapes that only implied her presence.
Naqi followed the shapes onto the balcony.
‘What,’ she said again, not even bothering to make it sound like a question.
‘There’s been a development,’ Mina said.
Naqi rubbed the sleep from her eyes. ‘With the node?’
‘Look. Down below. Right under us.’
Naqi pressed her stomach hard against the railing and leaned over as far as she dared. She had felt no real vertigo until they had lowered the sensor lines, and then suddenly there had been a physical connection between the airship and the ground. Was it her imagination, or had the airship lowered itself to about half its previous altitude, reeling in the lines at the same time?
The midnight light was all spectral shades of milky grey. The creased and crumpled landscape of the node reached away into mid-grey gloom, merging with the slate of the overlying cloud deck. Naqi saw nothing remarkable, other than the surprising closeness of the surface.
‘I mean really look down,’ Mina said.
Naqi pushed herself against the railing more than she had dared before, until she was standing on the very tips of her toes. Only then did she see it: directly below them was a peculiar circle of darkness, almost as if the airship was casting a distinct shadow beneath itself. It was a circular zone of exposed seawater, like a lagoon enclosed by the greater mass of the node. Steep banks of Juggler biomass, its heart a deep charcoal grey, rimmed the lagoon. Naqi studied it quietly. Her sister would judge her on any remark she made.
‘How did you see it?’ she asked eventually.
‘See it?’
‘It can’t be more than twenty metres wide. A dot like that would have hardly shown up on the topographic map.’
‘Naqi, you don’t understand. I didn’t steer us over the hole. It appeared below us, as we were moving. Listen to the motors. We’re still moving. The hole’s shadowing us. It follows us precisely. ’
‘Must be reacting to the sensors,’ Naqi said.
‘I’ve hauled them in. We’re not trailing anything within thirty metres of the surface. The node’s reacting to us, Naqi — to the presence of the airship. The Jugglers know we’re here, and they’re sending us a signal.’
‘Maybe they are. But it isn’t our job to interpret that signal. We’re just here to make measurements, not to interact with the Jugglers.’
‘So whose job is it?’ Mina asked.
‘Do I have to spell it out? Specialists from Umingmaktok.’
‘They won’t get here in time. You know how long nodes last. By the time the blackout’s lifted, by the time the swimmer corps hotshots get here, we’ll be sitting over a green smudge and not much more. This is a significant find, Naqi. It’s the largest node this season and it’s making a deliberate and clear attempt to invite swimmers.’
Naqi stepped back from the railing. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it all night. This isn’t just a large node, Naqi. Something’s happening — that’s why there’s been so much sprite activity. If we don’t swim here, we might miss something unique.’
‘And if we do swim, we’ll be violating every rule in the book. We’re not trained, Mina. Even if we learned something — even if the Jugglers deigned to communicate with us — we’d be ostracised from the entire scientific community.’
‘That would depend on what we learned, wouldn’t it?’
‘Don’t do this, Mina. It isn’t worth it.’
‘We won’t know if it’s worth it or not until we try, will we?’ Mina extended a hand. ‘Look. You’re right in one sense. Chances are pretty good nothing will happen. Normally you have to offer them a gift — a puzzle, or something rich in information. We haven’t got anything like that. What’ll probably happen is we’ll hit the water and there won’t be any kind of biochemical interaction. In which case, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to tell anyone. And if we do learn something, but it isn’t significant — well, we don’t have to tell anyone about that either. Only if we learn something major. Something so big that they’ll have to forget about a minor violation of protocol.’
‘A minor violation—?’ Naqi began, almost laughing at Mina’s audacity.
‘The point is, sis, we have a win-win situation here. And it’s been handed to us on a plate.’
‘You could also argue that we’ve been handed a major chance to fuck up spectacularly.’
‘You read it whichever way you like. I know what I see.’
‘It’s too dangerous, Mina. People have died…’ Naqi looked at Mina’s fungal patterns, enhanced and emphasised by her tattoos. ‘You flagged high for conformality. Doesn’t that worry you slightly?’
‘Conformality’s just a fairy tale they use to scare children into behaving,’ said Mina. ‘ “Eat all your greens or the sea will swallow you up for ever.” I take it about as seriously as I take the Thule kraken, or the drowning of Arviat.’
‘The Thule kraken is a joke, and Arviat never existed in the first place. But the last time I checked, conformality was an accepted phenomenon.’
‘It’s an accepted research topic. There’s a distinction.’
‘Don’t split hairs—’ Naqi began.
Mina gave every indication of not having heard Naqi speak. Her voice was distant, as if she were speaking to herself. It had a lilting, singsong quality. ‘Too late to even think about it now. But it isn’t long until dawn. I think it’ll still be there at dawn.’
She pushed past Naqi.
‘Where are you going now?’
‘To catch some sleep. I need to be fresh for this. So do you.’
They hit the lagoon with two gentle, anticlimactic splashes. Naqi was underwater for a moment before she bobbed to the surface, holding her breath. At first she had to make a conscious effort to start breathing again: the air immediately above the water was so saturated with microscopic organisms that choking was a real possibility. Mina, surfacing next to her, drew in gulps with wild enthusiasm, as if willing the tiny creatures to invade her lungs. She shrieked delight at the sudden cold. When they had both gained equilibrium, treading with their shoulders above water, Naqi was finally able to take stock. She saw everything through a stinging haze of tears. The gondola hovered above them, poised beneath the larger mass of the vacuum-bladder. The life-raft that it had deployed was sparkling new, rated for one hundred hours against moderate biological attack. But that was for mid-ocean, where the density of Juggler organisms would be much less than in the middle of a major node. Here, the hull might only endure a few tens of hours before it was consumed.
Once again, Naqi wondered if she should withdraw. There was still time. No real damage had yet been done. She could be back in the boat and back aboard the airship in a minute or so. Mina might not follow her, but she did not have to be complicit in her sister’s actions. But Naqi knew she would not be able to turn back. She could not show weakness now that she had come this far.