Read The Reality Dysfunction Page 45

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  Pernik’s fishing boats were halfway to the horizon by the time Syrinx emerged from the base of the tower on the morning she was due to visit the whales. The cool dawn sun had coloured the island’s covering of moss a matte black. She breathed in the salty air, relishing the cleanliness.

  <> Mosul said. He was walking beside her, holding a big box full of supplies for the voyage.

  <>

  <> Oenone said tartly.

  Syrinx grinned.

  <> Mosul said. <>

  <>

  Mosul led her along the broad avenue down to the rim quays. Water slapped lazily against the polyp. Pernik could have been a genuine island rooted in the planet’s crust for all the motion it made.

  <>

  <> Her grin faded. <>

  <>

  Syrinx thought of him curled up in the bed where she’d left him half an hour ago. There was no response to her halfhearted query. He had gone back to sleep. <>

  She watched a frown form on Mosul’s handsome sea-browned face. <> the semi-apologetic thought came.

  She told him and had to stifle a laugh as the surprise and faint disapproval spilled out of his mind despite a frantic effort to cover them up. Gets them every time.

  <> Oenone said. <>

  <>

  <>

  The quay was balanced on big cylindrical flotation drums which rode the swell in long undulations. Thick purple-red tubes ran along the edge, carrying nutrient fluid out to the boats. Leaky couplings dribbled the dark syrupy fluid into the water.

  Syrinx stood to one side as a couple of servitor chimps carrying boxes passed by. They were wildly different from the standard habitat housechimps, with a scaled reptilian skin a mild blue-green in colour.

  Their feet were broad, with long webbed toes.

  The boat that waited for them was called the Spiros, a seventeen-metre sailing craft with a white composite hull. Bitek units were blended into the structure with a skill that went far beyond mechanical practicality, it was almost artistry. The digestive organs and nutrient-reserve bladders were in the bilges, supporting the sub-sentient processor array and the mainsail membrane, as well as various ancillary systems. Her cabin fittings were all wooden, the timber coming from trees grown in the island’s central park. She was used by Mosul’s whole family for recreation. Which explained why the cabin was in a bit of a mess when they came on board.

  Mosul stood in the galley clutching his box of supplies and looking round darkly at the discarded wrappers, unwashed pans, and crusty stains on the work surface. He muttered under his breath. <> he apologized.

  <>

  <> There were more curses when he went forward and found the bunks in the same state.

  Syrinx overheard a furious affinity conversation with the juvenile offenders. Smiling to herself she started stowing supplies.

  Mosul unplugged the quay’s nutrient-feed veins from their couplings on the Spiros’s aft deck, then cast off. Leaning over the taffrail Syrinx watched the five-metre-long silver-grey eel-derived tail wriggling energetically just below the surface, nudging the boat away from the quay. The tightly whorled sail membrane began to unfurl from its twenty-metre-high mast. When it was fully open it was a triangle the colour of spring-fresh beech leaves, reinforced with a rubbery hexagonal web of muscle cells.

  It caught the morning breeze, filling out. A small white wake arose, curling around the bow. The tail straightened out, giving just the occasional tempestuous flick to maintain the course Mosul had loaded into the processor array.

  Syrinx made her way forward carefully. The decking was damp below her rubber-soled plimsolls, and they had already picked up a surprising turn of speed. She leaned contentedly on the rail, letting the wind bathe her face. Mosul came up and put his arm round her shoulder.

  <> Syrinx said as Pernik fell astern rapidly. <>

  <> Mosul said. <>

  They spent the morning talking, exchanging the memories of particularly intense or moving or treasured incidents from their respective lives.

  Syrinx found herself feeling slightly envious of his simplistic life of fishing and sailing, realizing that was the instinctive attraction she had felt at their first meeting. Mosul was so wonderfully uncomplicated.

  In turn he was almost in awe of her sophistication, the worlds she’d seen, people she’d met, the arduous naval duty.

  Once the sun had risen high enough to be felt on her skin, Syrinx stripped off and rubbed on a healthy dose of screening cream.

  <> she said as Mosul ran his hands over her back, between her shoulder blades where she couldn’t reach. <>

  <> he told her. <>

  She sighed and stretched out on a towel on the cabin’s roof, forward of the sail membrane. <>

  <>

  <>

  <>

  The sail creaked and fluttered gently as the day wore on. Syrinx found the rhythm of the boat lulling her, and coupled with the warmth of the sun she almost went to sleep.

  <> Oenone whispered on that unique section of affinity which was theirs alone.

  Without conscious thought she knew its orbit was taking it over the Spiros. She opened her eyes and looked into boundless azure sky. <>

  <>

  She waved inanely. And behind the velvet blueness she saw herself prone on the little ship, waving. The boat dropped away, becoming a speck, then vanishing. Both universes were solid blue.

  <> Oenone said. <>

  <>

  They sighted the whales that afternoon.

  Black mountains were leaping out of the water. Syrinx saw them in the distance. Huge curved bodies sliding out of the waves in defiance of gravity, crashing down amid breakers of boiling surf. Fountain plumes of vapour rocketing into the sky from their blow-holes.

  Syrinx couldn’t help it, she jumped up and down on the deck, pointing.

  “Look, look!”

  <> Mosul said, amusement and a strange pride mingling in his thoughts. < s, a big school, I reckon there’s about a hundred or more.>>

  <> Syrinx demanded.

  <> Oenone reassured her. <>

  <> Syrinx laughed. Their mouths were upturned, smiling. A perpetual smile. And why not? Such creatures’ existing was cause to smile.

  Mosul angled Spiros in closer, ordering the edges of the sail to furl.

  The noise of the school rolled over the boat. The smack of those huge bodies as they jumped and splashed, a deep gullet-shaking whistle from the blow-holes. She tried to work out how big they were as the Spiros approached the school’s fringes. Some, the big adult bulls, must have been thirty metres long.

  A calf came swimming over to the Spiros; over ten metres long, spurting from his blow-hole. His mother followed him closely, the two of them bumping together and sliding against each other. Huge forked tails churned up and down, flukes slapping the water, while flippers beat like shrunken wings. Syrinx watched in utter fascination as the two passed within fifty metres of the boat, rocking it alarmingly in their pounding wake. But she hardly noticed the pitching, the calf was feeding, suckling from its mother as she rolled onto her side.

  “That is the most stupendous, miraculous sight,” she said, spellbound.

  Her hands were gripping the rail, knuckles whitening. “And they’re not even xenocs. They’re ours. Earth’s.”

  “Not any more.” Mosul was at her side, as mesmerized as she.

  <>

  <>

  Syrinx curled her arm round his, and pressed against him. <>

  <>

  She kissed him lightly. <> Then rested her head against him, and returned her entire attention to the whales, gathering up every nuance and committing it lovingly to memory.

  They followed the school for the rest of the afternoon as the giant animals played and wallowed in the ocean. Then when dusk fell, Mosul turned the Spiros’s bow away. The last she saw of the school was their massive dark bodies arching gracefully against the golden red skyline, whilst the roar of the blow-holes faded away into the ocean’s swell.

  That night twisters of phosphenic radiance wriggled through the water around the hull, casting a wan diamond-blue light over the half-reefed sail membrane. Syrinx and Mosul brought cushions out onto the deck, and made love under the stars. Several times Oenone gazed down on their entwined bodies, its presence contributing to the wondrous sense of fulfilment in Syrinx’s mind. She didn’t tell Mosul.

  The Laymil project’s Electronics Division was housed in a three-storey octagonal building near the middle of the campus. The walls were a soft white polyp with large oval windows, and climbing hydrangeas had reached the bottom of the second-storey windows. Chuantawa trees from Raouil were planted around the outside, forty-metre-high specimens, their rubbery bark and long tongue-shaped leaves a bright purple, clusters of bronze berries dangling from every branch.

  Ione walked towards it down the amaranthus-lined path from the nearest of the campus’s five tube stations, three serjeant bodyguards in tow. Her hair was still slightly damp from her swim with Haile, and the ends brushed against the collar of her formal green-silk suit jacket. She drew wide-eyed stares and cautious smiles from the few project staff wandering around the campus.

  Parker Higgens was waiting just outside the main entrance, dressed as ever in his hazel-coloured suit with red spirals on the flared arms. The trousers were fashionably baggy, but he was filling out the jacket quite comfortably. His mop of white hair hung down over his forehead in some disarray.

  Ione forbade a smile as they shook hands. The director was always so nervous around her. He was good at his job, but they certainly didn’t share the same sense of humour. He would think teasing was a personal insult.

  She greeted Oski Katsura, the head of the Electronics Division. She had taken over from the former head six months ago; her appointment had been the first Ione had confirmed. A seventy-year-old, taller than Ione, with a distinguished willowy beauty, wearing an ordinary white lab smock.

  “You have some good news for me, then?” Ione asked as they went inside and started walking down the central corridor.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.

  “Most of the stack’s circuitry was composed of memory crystals,” Oski Katsura said. “The processors were subsidiary elements to facilitate access and recording. Basically it was a memory core.”

  “I see. And had the ice preserved it like we hoped?” Ione asked. “It looked intact when I saw it.”

  “Oh, yes. It was almost completely intact, the chips and crystals encased in ice functioned perfectly after they had been removed and cleaned. The reason it has taken us so long to decrypt the data stored in the crystals is that it is non-standard.” They came to a set of wide double doors, and Oski Katsura datavised a security code to open them, gesturing Ione through.

  The Electronics Division always reminded her of a cyberfactory: rows of identical clean rooms illuminated by harsh white lighting, all of them filled with enigmatic blocks of equipment trailing wires and cables everywhere. This room was no different, broad benches ran round the walls, with another down the centre, cluttered with customized electronics cabinets and test rigs. The far end was a glass wall partitioning off six workshop cubicles. Several researchers were inside, using robot precision-assembly cells to fabricate various units. At the opposite end of the room to the cubicles a stainless steel pedestal sat on the floor, supporting a big sphere made up of tough transparent composite. Thick environmental-support hoses snaked away from the lower quarter of the sphere, plugging into bulky conditioning units. Ione saw the Laymil electronics stack in the middle of the sphere, with power leads and fibre-optic cables radiating out of its base. More surprisingly, Lieria was standing in front of the long bench in the middle of the room, her tractamorphic arms branching into five or six tentacles apiece, all of which were wound through an electronics cabinet.

  Ione was quite proud she could recognize the Kiint immediately. <>

  The tentacle appendages uncoiled from the cabinet, flowing back into one solid pillar of flesh again. Lieria turned ponderously, careful not to knock into anything. <>

  <>

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  One of Lieria’s arms lengthened to pick up a slender white wafer ten centimetres square from the bench. The unit emitted a single whistle, then spoke. “Greetings, Director Parker Higgens.”

  He gave the xenoc a small bow.

  Oski Katsura tapped the environment bubble with
a fingernail. “We cleaned and tested all the components before we reassembled it,” she told Ione.

  “That ice wasn’t pure water, there were some peculiar hydrocarbons mixed in.”

  “Laymil faecal matter,” Lieria said through the wafer.

  “Quite. But the real challenge came from the data itself, it was like nothing we have found so far. It seemed almost totally randomized. At first we thought it might be some kind of artform, then we began to notice irregular trait repetition.”

  <> Tranquillity translated.

  <> she asked, half amused.

  <>

  Ione kept her face neutral during the second-long exchange. “Which was enough to formulate a recognition program,” she said smoothly.

  “Quite,” said Oski Katsura. “Ninety per cent of the data was garbage to us, but these patterns kept appearing.”

  “Once we had enough of them clearly identified we held an interdisciplinary conference and asked for best guesses,” Parker Higgens said. “Bit of a long shot, but it paid off handsomely. I’m pleased to say Lieria said they resembled Laymil optical impulses.”

  “Correct,” Lieria said through the wafer. “Similarity approaching eighty-five per cent. The data packages represented colours to a Laymil eye.”

  “Once we’d established that, we ran a comparison on the rest of the data, trying to match it with other Laymil nerve impulses,” Oski Katsura said.

  “Jackpot. Well, more or less. It took four months to write interpretation programs and build suitable interface units, but we got there in the end.” A wave of her hand took in the benches and all their elaborate equipment. “We unravelled the first full sequence last night.”

  Dawning realization at what Oski Katsura was actually saying brought a sense of real excitement to Ione. Her eyes were drawn to the stack in its protective bubble. She touched the transparent surface reverently, it was warmer than the ambient temperature. “This is a recording of a Laymil sensorium?” she asked.