‘We accept that,’ Crane said, with an audible sigh. ‘But the degree of contamination is slight compared to other worlds. Vahishta lacks the resources for a trip to a previously unvisited Juggler world, so the next best thing is to visit one that has suffered the smallest degree of human cultural pollution. Turquoise fits the bill.’
Tak Thonburi held the moment before responding, playing to the crowd again. Naqi rather admired the way he did it.
‘Good. I’m very… pleased… to hear it. And might I ask just what it is about our ocean that we can offer you?’
‘Nothing except the ocean itself,’ said Amesha Crane. ‘We simply wish to join you in its study. If you will allow it, members of the Vahishta Foundation will collaborate with native Turquoise scientists and study teams. They will shadow them and offer interpretation or advice when requested. Nothing more than that.’
‘That’s all?’
Crane smiled. ‘That’s all. It’s not as if we’re asking for the world, is it?’
Naqi remained in Umingmaktok for three days after the arrival, visiting friends and taking care of business for the Moat. The newcomers had departed, taking their shuttle to one of the other snowflake cities — Prachuap or the recently married Qaanaaq-Pangnirtung, perhaps — where a smaller but no less worthy group of city dignitaries would welcome Captain Moreau and his passengers.
In Umingmaktok the booths and bunting were packed away and normal business resumed. Litter abounded. Worm dealers did brisk business, as they always did during times of mild gloom. There were far fewer transport craft moored to the arms, and no sign at all of the intense media presence of a few days before. Tourists had gone back to their home cities and the children were safely back in school. Between meetings Naqi sat in the midday shade of half-empty restaurants and bars, observing the same puzzled disappointment in every face she encountered. Deep down she felt it herself. For two years they had been free to imprint every possible fantasy on the approaching ship. Even if the newcomers had arrived with less than benign intent, there would still have been something interesting to talk about: the possibility, however remote, that one’s own life might be about to become drastically more exciting.
But now none of that was going to happen. Undoubtedly Naqi would be involved with the visitors at some point, allowing them to visit the Moat or one of the outlying research zones she managed, but there would be nothing life-changing.
She thought back to that night with Mina, when they had heard the news. Everything had changed then. Mina had died, and Naqi had found herself taking her sister’s role in the Moat. She had risen to the challenge and promotions had followed with gratifying swiftness, until she was in effective charge of the Moat’s entire scientific programme. But that sense of closure she had yearned for was still absent. The men she had slept with — men who were almost always swimmers — had never provided it, and by turns they had each lost patience with her, realising that they were less important to her as people than what they represented, as connections to the sea. It had been months since her last romance, and once Naqi had recognised the way her own subconscious was drawing her back to the sea, she had drawn away from contact with swimmers. She had been drifting since then, daring to hope that the newcomers would allow her some measure of tranquillity.
But the newcomers had not supplied it.
She supposed she would have to find it elsewhere.
On the fourth day Naqi returned to the Moat on a high-speed dirigible. She arrived near sunset, dropping down from high altitude to see the structure winking back at her, a foreshortened ellipse of grey-white ceramic lying against the sea like some vast discarded bracelet. From horizon to horizon there were several Juggler nodes visible, webbed together by the faintest of filaments — to Naqi they looked like motes of ink spreading into blotting paper — but there were also smaller dabs of green within the Moat itself.
The structure was twenty kilometres wide and now it was nearly finished. Only a narrow channel remained where the two ends of the bracelet did not quite meet: a hundred-metre-wide sheer-sided aperture flanked on either side by tall, ramshackle towers of accommodation modules, equipment sheds and construction cranes. To the north, strings of heavy cargo dirigibles ferried processed ore and ceramic cladding from Narathiwat atoll, lowering it down to the construction teams on the Moat.
They had been working here for nearly twenty years. The hundred metres of the Moat that projected above the water was only one-tenth of the full structure — a kilometre-high ring resting on the seabed. In a matter of months the gap — little more than a notch in the top of the Moat — would be sealed, closed off by immense hermetically tight sea-doors. The process would be necessarily slow and delicate, for what was being attempted here was not simply the closing-off of part of the sea. The Moat was an attempt to isolate a part of the living ocean, sealing off a community of Pattern Juggler organisms within its impervious ceramic walls.
The high-speed dirigible swung low over the aperture. The thick green waters streaming through the cut had the phlegmatic consistency of congealing blood. Thick, ropy tendrils permitted information transfer between the external sea and the cluster of small nodes within the Moat. Swimmers were constantly present, either inside or outside the Moat, kenning the state of the sea and establishing that the usual Juggler processes continued unabated.
The dirigible docked with one of the two flanking towers.
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 stilclass="underline" 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 feel 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 a few 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?’