“Am I . . . all right?” he struggled to ask the revival medicos, while all the time his attention was being snared by the nothingness beyond the station window, like someone staring into the black counterpart of a snowstorm.
“You’re almost clear,” said the medico next to him, watching neural readouts scroll through midair, digesting their import with quiet taps of a stylus against his lower lip. “But Valdez faded. That means Lefevre’s bumped up to primary. Think you can work with her?”
“Bit late for doubts now, isn’t it?”
“It’s a joke, Dan. Now, how much do you remember? Revival amnesia’s the one thing I haven’t scanned for.”
It seemed like a stupid question, but as soon as he interrogated his memory, he found it responding sluggishly, like a document retrieval system in an inefficient bureaucracy.
“Do you remember Spindrift?” the medico asked, with a note of concern in his voice. “It’s vital that you remember Spindrift . . . ”
He remembered it, yes—but for a moment he could not connect it with any other memories. What he remembered—the last thing he remembered which was not adrift—was Yellowstone. They left it twelve years after the Eighty; twelve years after Calvin’s corporeal death; twelve years after Philip Lascaille had spoken to Sylveste; twelve years after the man had drowned himself, his purpose seemingly fulfilled.
The expedition was small but well equipped—a lighthugger crew, partially chimeric, Ultranauts who seldom mingled with the other humans; twenty scientists largely culled from SISS, and four potential contact delegates. Only two of the four would actually travel to the surface of the Shroud.
Lascaille’s Shroud was their objective, but not their first port of call. Sylveste had heeded what Lascaille had told him; the Pattern Jugglers were vital to the success of his mission. It was first necessary to visit them on their own world, tens of light-years from the Shroud. Even then Sylveste had little idea of what to expect. But, rash as it seemed, he trusted Lascaille’s advice. The man would not have broken his silence for nothing.
The Jugglers had been a curiosity for more than a century. They existed on a number of worlds, all of them dominated by single planet-sized oceans. The Jugglers were a biochemical consciousness distributed through each ocean, composed of trillions of co-acting micro-organisms, arranged into island-sized clumps. All the Jugglers” worlds were tectonically active, and it was theorised that the Jugglers drew their energy from hydrothermal outlet vents on the seabed; that the heat was converted to bioelectrical energy and transferred to the surface via tendrils of organic superconductor draping down through kilometres of black cold. The Jugglers” purpose—assuming they had a purpose—remained completely unknown. It was clear that they had the ability to mediate the biospheres of the worlds in which they had been seeded, acting like a single, intelligently acting mass of phytoplankton—but no one knew if this was merely secondary to some hidden, higher function. What was known—and again not properly understood—was that the Jugglers had the capacity to store and retrieve information, acting like a single, planetwide neural net. This information was stored on many levels, from the gross connectivity patterns of surface-floating tendrils, down to free-floating strands of RNA. It was impossible to say where the oceans began and the Jugglers ended—just as it was impossible to say whether each world contained many Jugglers or merely one arbitrarily extended individual, for the islands themselves were linked by organic bridges. They were world-sized living repositories of information; vast informational sponges. Almost anything entering a Juggler ocean would be penetrated by microscopic tendrils, partially dissolved, until its structural and chemical properties had been revealed, and that information would then be passed into the biochemical storage of the ocean itself. As Lascaille had intimated, the Jugglers could imprint these patterns as well as encode them. Supposedly those patterns could include the mentalities of other species which had come into contact with the Jugglers—such as the Shrouders.
Human study teams had been investigating the Pattern Jugglers for many decades. Humans swimming in the Juggler-infested ocean were able to enter rapport states with the organism, as Juggler micro-tendrils filtered temporarily into the human neocortex, establishing quasi-synaptic links between the swimmers’ minds and the rest of the ocean. It was, they said, like communing with sentient algae. Trained swimmers reported feeling their consciousness expand to include the entire ocean, their memories becoming vast, verdant and ancient. Their perceptual boundaries became malleable, although at no point was there any sense that the ocean itself was truly self-aware; more that it was a mirror, massively reflecting human consciousness: the ultimate solipsism. Swimmers made startling breakthroughs in mathematics, as if the ocean had enhanced their creative faculties. Some even reported that these boosts persisted for some time after they had left the oceanic matrix and returned to dry land or orbit. Was it possible that some physical change had taken place in their minds?
So it was that the concept of the Juggler transform arose. With additional training, the swimmers learnt how to select specific forms of transform. Neurologists stationed on the Juggler world attempted to map the brain alterations wrought by the aliens, but with only partial success. The transformations were extraordinarily subtle, more akin to retuning a violin than ripping it apart and building it from scratch. They were rarely permanent—days, weeks or, very occasionally, years later, the transform would fade.
Such was the state of knowledge when Sylveste’s expedition reached the Juggler world Spindrift. Now he remembered it, of course—the oceans; the tides; the volcanic chains and the constant, overpowering seaweedy stench of the organism itself. Smell unlocked the rest. All four potential Shrouder contact delegates had learnt the chalk diagram on a deep level of recall. After months of training with expert swimmers, the four entered the ocean and filled their minds with the form Lascaille had given them.
The Juggler had reached into them, partially dissolved their minds, and then restructured them according to its own embedded templates.
When the four emerged, it seemed at first that Lascaille had been crazy after all.
They did not exhibit freakishly alien modes of behaviour, nor had they suddenly gained answers to the great cosmic mysteries. Questioned, none of them reported feeling particularly different, nor were they any the wiser about the identity or nature of the Shrouders. But sensitive neurological tests probed deeper than human intuition. The spatial and cognitive skills of the four had changed, though in ways that were perplexingly difficult to quantify. As days passed, they reported experiencing states of mind that were—paradoxically—both familiar and yet utterly alien. Evidently something had changed, though no one could be sure that the states of mind they were experiencing had any connection with the Shrouders.
Nonetheless, they had to move quickly.
As soon as the initial tests were complete, the four delegates entered reefersleep. The cold prevented the Juggler transforms from decaying, though they would inevitably begin to fade once the four were awakened, despite a complicated regimen of experimental neuro-stabilising drugs. They were kept asleep throughout the voyage to Lascaille’s Shroud, then for weeks in the vicinity of the object itself, as their study station was manoeuvred closer, within the nominal 3 AU safe distance which it had maintained until that point. Even then, the delegates were not awoken until the eve of their trip to the surface.
“I . . . . remember,” Sylveste said. “I remember Spindrift.” And then there was a moment while the medico kept tapping his stylus against his lips, assimilating the reams of information pouring from the medical analysis systems, before nodding and passing him fit for the mission.
“The old place has changed a bit,” Manoukhian said.
He was right, Khouri saw. She was looking out over something she hardly recognised as Chasm City. The Mosquito Net was gone. Now the city was open to the elements once more, its buildings rising nakedly into Yellowstone’s atmosphere where once they had sheltered beneath the merged drapery of the domes. The Mademoiselle’s black château was no longer amongst the tallest structures. Tiered, aero-formed monsters knifed into the broiling brown sky, like sharks’ fins, ,or blades of spinifex, slashed by countless scores of tiny windows, emblazoned with the giant Boolean-logic symbols of the Conjoiners. Like yacht sails, the buildings rose from what remained of the Mulch on slim masts so that their leading edges cut into the wind. Only a scattering of the old gnarled architecture remained, and only a vestigial remnant of the Canopy. The old city forest had been slashed into history by the shining bladelike towers.
“They grew something in the chasm,” Manouhkian said. “Right down in the depths. They call it the Lilly.” His voice took on a tone of fascinated repulsion. “People who’ve seen it say it’s like a huge piece of breathing viscera, like a piece of God’s stomach. It’s fastened to the walls of the chasm. The stuff belching out of the depths is poisonous, but by the time it’s been through the Lilly it’s just about breathable.”
“All this in twenty-two years?”
“Yes,” someone answered. Movement played in the gloss black armour of the shutters. Khouri turned around in time to catch a palanquin resting silently. Seeing it, she remembered the Mademoiselle, and much else too. It was as if no more than a minute had elapsed since their last meeting.
“Thank you for bringing her here, Carlos.”
“Will that be all?”
“I think so.” Her voice echoed slightly. “Time is of the essence, you see. Even after all these years. I’ve located a crew who need someone like Khouri, but they won’t wait for more than a few days before leaving the system. She will need to be educated, primed in her role, and introduced to them before we lose this opportunity.”
“What if I say no?” Khouri said.
“But you won’t, will you? Not now that you know what I can do for you. You do remember, don’t you?”
“It’s not something you forget very easily.” She remembered clearly now what the Mademoiselle had shown her: that the other reefersleep casket held someone. The person inside had been Fazil, her husband. Despite what she had been told, she had never been separated from him. The two of them had both come from Sky’s Edge, the clerical error more benign than she had imagined. Yet she had still been deceived. Evidence of the Mademoiselle’s handiwork was clear from the outset. Khouri’s job working as a Shadowplay assassin had come about a little too easily: in hindsight, the role had served only to demonstrate her fitness for the task ahead. As for ensuring her compliance, that was simplicity itself. The Mademoiselle had Fazil. If Khouri refused to do what was required of her, she would never see her husband again.
“I knew you would see sense,” the Mademoiselle said. “What I ask of you is really not so difficult, Khouri.”
“What about the crew you’ve found?”
“They’re just traders,” Manoukhian said soothingly. “I used to be one myself, you know. That’s how I came to rescue . . . ”
“Enough, Carlos.”
“Sorry.” He looked back at the palanquin. “All I’m saying is, how bad can they be?”
By accident or subconscious design—it was never entirely clear—the SISS contact craft resembled an infinity symbol: two lobelike modules packed with life support equipment, sensors and comms gear, spaced by a collar rimmed with thrusters and additional sensor arrays. Two people could fit into either of the lobes, and in the event of a mid-mission neural fadeout, one or both of the lobes could be ejected.
Ramping up thrust, the contact craft fell towards the Shroud, while the station made a retreat back beyond the safe range, towards the waiting lighthugger. Pascale’s narrative showed the craft dwindling to ever-smaller size, until only the livid glare of its thrust and the pulsing red and green of its running lights remained, and then grew steadily fainter; the surrounding blackness seeming to occlude it like spreading ink.
No one could be certain of what happened thereafter. In the events which followed, most of the information gleaned by Sylveste and Lefevre on their approach was lost, including the data transmitted back to the station and the lighthugger. Not only were the timescales uncertain, but even the precise order of events was questionable. All that was known was what Sylveste himself remembered—and as Sylveste, by his own admission, underwent periods of altered or diminished consciousness in the vicinity of the Shroud, his memories could not be taken as the literal truth of events.
What was known was this.
Sylveste and Lefevre approached closer to the Shroud than any human being had ever done, even Lascaille. If what Lascaille had told them was true, then their transforms were fooling the Shroud’s defences; forcing it to envelop them in a pocket of flattened spacetime while the rest of the boundary seethed with vicious gravitational riptides. No one, even now, pretended to understand how this might be happening: how the Shroud’s buried mechanisms were able to curve spacetime through such insanely sharp geometries, when a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy. Nor did anyone understand how consciousness could bleed into the spacetime around the Shroud, so that the Shroud itself could recognise the sorts of minds which were attempting to gain passage into its heart, and at the same time reshape the thoughts and memories of those same minds. Evidently there was some hidden link between thought itself and the underlying processes of spacetime; the one influencing the other. Sylveste had found references to an antiquated theory, centuries dead, which had proposed a link between the quantum processes of consciousness and the quantum-gravitational mechanisms which underpinned spacetime, through the unification of something called the Weyl curvature tensor . . . but consciousness was no better understood now; the theory was as speculative as it had ever been. Perhaps, though, in the vicinity of the Shroud, any faint linkage between consciousness and spacetime was massively amplified. Sylveste and Lefevre were thinking their way through the storm, their reshaped minds calming the gravitational forces which seethed around them, only metres from the skin of their ship. They were like snake-charmers, moving through a pit of cobras, their music defining a tiny region of safety. Safe, that was, until the music stopped playing—or began to grow discordant—and the snakes began to break out of their hypnotic placidity. It would never be entirely clear how close Sylveste and Lefevre got to the Shroud before the music soured and the cobras of gravity began to stir.