But what exactly did it mean to drown on Turquoise?
‘It’s happening all over the planet,’ Naqi said. She was still shivering, but now it was as much a shiver of awe as one of cold. ‘It’s denying itself to us by smashing our cities.’
‘Your cities never harmed it.’
‘I don’t think it’s really that interested in making a distinction between one bunch of people and another, Rafael. It’s just getting rid of us all, disciples or not. You can’t really blame it for that, can you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Weir said.
He cracked the globe, spilled its contents into the sea.
Naqi knew there was nothing she could do now; there was no prospect of recovering the tiny black grains. She would only have to miss one, and it would be as bad as missing them all.
The little black grains vanished beneath the olive surface of the water.
It was done.
Weir looked at her, his eyes desperate for forgiveness.
‘You understand that I had to do this, don’t you? It isn’t something I do lightly.’
‘I know. But it wasn’t necessary. The ocean’s already turned against us. Crane has lost. Ormazd has lost.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Weir said. ‘But I couldn’t take the chance that we might be wrong. At least this way I know for sure.’
‘You’ve murdered a world.’
He nodded. ‘It’s exactly what I came here to do. Please don’t blame me for it.’
Naqi opened the equipment locker where she had stowed the broken vial of Juggler toxin. She removed the flare pistol, snatched away its safety pin and pointed it at Weir. ‘I don’t blame you, no. Don’t even hate you for it.’
He started to say something, but Naqi cut him off.
‘But it’s not something I can forgive.’
She sat in silence, alone, until the node became active. The organic structures around her were beginning to show the same kinds of frantic rearrangement Naqi had seen within the Moat. There was a cold sharp breeze from the node’s heart.
It was time to leave.
She steered the boat away from the node, cautiously, still not completely convinced that she was safe from the delegates even though the first shuttle had been destroyed. Undoubtedly the loss of that craft would have been communicated to the others, and before very long some more of them would arrive, bristling with belligerence. The ocean might attempt to destroy the new arrivals, but this time the delegates would be profoundly suspicious.
She brought the boat to a halt when she was a kilometre from the fringe of the node. By then it was running through the same crazed alterations she had previously witnessed. She felt the same howling wind of change. In a moment the end would come. The toxin would seep into the node’s controlling core, instructing the entire biomass to degrade itself to a lump of dumb vegetable matter. The same killing instructions would already be travelling along the internode tendril connections, winging their way over the horizon. Allowing for the topology of the network, it would only take fifteen or twenty hours for the message to reach every node on the planet. Within a day it would be over. The Jugglers would be gone, the information they’d encoded erased beyond recall. And Turquoise itself would begin to die at the same time, its oxygen atmosphere no longer maintained by the oceanic organisms.
Another five minutes passed, then ten.
The node’s transformations were growing less hectic. She recalled this moment of false calm. It meant only that the node had given up trying to counteract the toxin, accepting the logical inevitability of its fate. A thousand times over this would be repeated around Turquoise. Towards the end, she guessed, there would be less resistance, for the sheer futility of it would have been obvious. The world would accept its fate.
Another five minutes passed.
The node remained. The structures were changing, but only gently. There was no sign of the emerging mound of undifferentiated matter she had seen before.
What was happening?
She waited another quarter of an hour and then steered the boat back towards the node, bumping past Weir’s floating corpse on the way. Tentatively, an idea was forming in her mind. It appeared that the node had absorbed the toxin without dying. Was it possible that Weir had made a mistake? Was it possible that the toxin’s effectiveness depended only on it being used once?
Perhaps.
There still had to be tendril connections between the Moat and the rest of the ocean at the time that the first wave of transformations had taken place. They had been severed later — either when the doors closed, or by some autonomic process within the extended organism itself — but until that moment, there would still have been informational links with the wider network of nodes. Could the dying nodes have sent sufficient warning that the other nodes were now able to find a strategy for protecting themselves?
Again, perhaps.
It never paid to take anything for granted where the Jugglers were concerned.
She parked the boat by the node’s periphery. Naqi stood up and removed her clothes for the final time, certain that she would not need them again. She looked down at herself, astonished at the vivid tracery of green that now covered her body. On one level, the evidence of alien cellular invasion was quite horrific.
On another, it was startlingly beautiful.
Smoke licked from the horizon. Machines clawed through the sky, hunting nervously. She stepped to the edge of the boat, tensing herself at the moment of commitment. Her fear subsided, replaced by an intense, loving calm. She stood on the threshold of something alien, but in place of terror what she felt was only an imminent sense of homecoming. Mina was waiting for her below. Together, nothing could stop them.
Naqi smiled, spread her arms and returned to the sea.
GALACTIC NORTH
For David Pringle
GREAT WALL OF MARS
‘You realise you might die down there,’ said Warren.
Nevil Clavain looked into his brother’s one good eye; the one the Conjoiners had left him with after the Battle of Tharsis Bulge. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘But if there’s another war, we might all die. I’d rather take that risk, if there’s a chance for peace.’
Warren shook his head, slowly and patiently. ‘No matter how many times we’ve been over this, you just don’t seem to get it, do you? There can’t ever be any kind of peace while they’re still down there. That’s what you don’t understand, Nevil. The only long-term solution here is…’ he trailed off.
‘Go on,’ Clavain goaded. ‘Say it. Genocide.’
Warren might have been about to answer when there was a bustle of activity along the docking tube, at the far end from the waiting spacecraft. Through the door Clavain saw a throng of media people, then someone gliding through them, fielding questions with only the curtest of answers. That was Sandra Voi, the Demarchist woman who would be accompanying him to Mars.
‘It’s not genocide when they’re just a faction, not an ethnically distinct race,’ Warren said, before Voi was within earshot.