The elderly were too frail to spend much time in the high-gee rings. Once they had come to the core, they often never left. Clavain passed a couple now. They both wore support rigs, medical harnesses that doubled as propulsion packs. Their legs trailed behind them like afterthoughts. They were coaxing a quintet of children into kicking off from one side of a woody hollow into open space.
Seen without augmented vision, the scene had a tangibly sinister quality. The children were garbed in black suits and helmets that protected their skin against sharp branches. Their eyes were hidden behind black goggles, making it difficult to interpret their expressions. The elderly were equally drab, though they wore no helmets. But their fully visible faces betrayed nothing resembling enjoyment. To Clavain they looked like undertakers engaged in some solemn burial duty that would be ruined by the slightest hint of levity.
Clavain willed his implants to reveal the truth. There was a moment of florid growth as bright structures blossomed into existence out of thin air. The children wore filmy clothes now, marked with tribal swirls and zigzags of lurid colour. Their heads were bare, unencumbered by helmets. Two were boys; three were girls. He judged their ages to lie between five and seven. Their expressions were not entirely joyous, but neither were they miserable or neutral. Instead, they all looked slightly scared and slightly exhilarated. No doubt there was some rivalry going on, each child weighing the benefits and risks of being the first to take the aerial plunge.
The elderly couple still looked much the same, but now Clavain was attuned to the thoughts they were radiating. Bathed in an aura of encouragement, their faces now looked serene and patient rather than dour. They were quite prepared to wait hours for the children.
The environment itself had also changed. The air was full of jewel-bright butterflies and dragonflies, darting to and fro on busy trajectories. Neon caterpillars worked their way through the greenery. Hummingbirds hovered and translated from flower to flower, moving like precisely programmed clockwork toys. Monkeys, lemurs and flying squirrels jumped into free space with abandon, their eyes gleaming like marbles.
This was what the children perceived, and what Clavain was tuned into. They had known no other world but this storybook abstraction. Subtly, as they aged, the data reaching their brains would be manipulated. They would never notice the change from day to day, but the creatures haunting the forest’s spaces would gradually grow more realistic, their colours dimming to naturalistic greens and browns, blacks and whites. The creatures would become smaller and more elusive. Eventually, only the real animals would remain. Then — the children would be ten or eleven at this point — they would be gently educated about the machines that had doctored their view of the world so far. They would learn of their implants, and how they enabled a second layer to be draped over reality, one that could be shaped into any form imaginable.
For Clavain the educational process had been somewhat more brutal. It had been during his second visit to Galiana’s nest on Mars. She had shown him the nursery where the young Conjoiners were being instructed, but at that point he had not possessed any implants of his own. Then he had been injured, and Galiana had filled his head with medichines. He still remembered the heart-stopping moment when he had first experienced his subjective reality being manipulated. The feeling of his own skull being gate-crashed by numerous other minds had only been part of it, but perhaps the most shocking element had been his first glimpse of the realm the Conjoiners walked through. The psychologists had a term for it — cognitive breakthrough — but few of them could have experienced it for themselves.
Suddenly he drew the attention of the children.
[Clavain!] One of the boys had pushed a thought into his head.
Clavain made the tender come to a halt in the middle of the space the children were using for flying lessons. He orientated the tender so that he was more or less level with them.
Hello. Clavain gripped the handrail in front of him like a preacher at a pulpit.
A girl looked at him intently. [Where have you been, Clavain?]
Outside. He eyed the tutors carefully.
[Outside? Beyond the Mother Nest?] the girl persisted.
He was unsure how to answer. He did not remember how much knowledge the children possessed at this age. Certainly, they knew nothing of the war. But it was difficult to discuss one thing without it leading to another. Beyond the Mother Nest, yes.
[In a spaceship?]
Yes. In a very big spaceship.
[Can I see it?] the girl asked.
One day, I expect. Not today though. He felt the tutors’ disquiet, though neither had placed a concrete thought in his head. You’ve got other things to take care of, I think.
[What did you do in the spaceship, Clavain?]
Clavain scratched his beard. He did not enjoy misleading children and had never quite got the hang of white lies. A mild distillation of the truth seemed the best approach. I helped someone.
[Whom did you help?]
A lady… a woman.
[Why did she need your help?]
Her ship — her spaceship — had got into trouble. She needed some assistance and I just happened to be passing by.
[What was the lady called?]
Bax. Antoinette Bax. I gave her a nudge with a rocket, to stop her falling back into a gas giant.
[Why was she coming out of the gas giant?]
I don’t really know, to tell the truth.
[Why did she have two names, Clavain?]
Because… This was going to get very messy, he realised. Look, um, I shouldn’t interrupt you, I really shouldn’t. He felt a palpable relaxation in the tutors’ emotional aura. So—um— who’s going to show me what a good flier they are, then?
It was all the spur that the children needed. A welter of voices crowded his skull, competing for his attention. [Me, Clavain, me!]
He watched them kick off into the void, barely able to contain themselves.
There was a moment when he was still peering into green infinity, and then the tender burst through a shimmer of leaves into a clearing. It had navigated the forest for another three or four minutes after leaving the children, knowing exactly where to find Felka.
The clearing was a spherical space enclosed on all sides by dense growth. One of the structural spars thrust its way clean through the volume, bulging with residential spaces. The tender whirred closer to the spar and then held station with its impellers while Clavain disembarked. Ladders and vines provided hand– and footholds, allowing him to work his way along the spar until he found the entrance to its hollow interior. There was some sense of vertigo, but it was slight. Part of his mind would probably always quail at the thought of clambering recklessly through what felt like a forest’s elevated canopy, but the years had diminished that nagging primate anxiety to the point where it was barely noticeable.
‘Felka…’ he called ahead. ‘It’s Clavain.’
There was no immediate answer. He burrowed deeper, descending — or ascending? — headfirst. ‘Felka…’
‘Hello, Clavain.’ Her voice boomed from the middle distance, echoed and amplified by the spar’s peculiar acoustics.
He followed the voice; he could not feel her thoughts. Felka did not participate routinely in the Conjoined mind-state, although that had not always been the case. But even if she had, Clavain would have maintained a certain distance. Long ago, by mutual consent, they had elected to exclude themselves from each other’s minds, except at the most trivial level. Anything else would have been an unwanted intimacy.
The shaft ended in a womblike interior space. This was where Felka spent most of her time these days, in her laboratory and atelier. The walls were a beguiling swirl of wooden growth patterns. To Clavain’s eye, the ellipses and knots resembled geodesic contours of highly stressed space-time. Lanterns glowed in sconces, throwing his shadow across the wood in threatening ogrelike shapes. He helped himself along by his fingertips, brushing past ornate wooden contraptions that float
ed untethered through the spar. Clavain recognised most of the objects well enough, but one or two looked new to him.
He snatched one from the air for closer examination. It rattled in his grasp. It was a human head fashioned from a single helix of wood; through the gaps in the spiral he could see another head inside, and another inside that one. Possibly there were more. He let the object go and seized another. This one was a sphere bristling with sticks, projecting out to various distances from the surface. Clavain adjusted one of the sticks and felt something click and move within the sphere, like the tumbler of a lock.
‘I see you’ve been busy, Felka,’ he said.
‘I gather I wasn’t the only one,’ she replied. ‘I heard reports. Some business about a prisoner?’
Clavain pawed past another barrage of wooden objects and rounded a corner in the spar. He squeezed through a connecting aperture into a small windowless chamber lit only by lanterns. Their light threw pinks and emeralds across the ochre and tan shades of the walls. One wall consisted entirely of numerous wooden faces, carved with mildly exaggerated features. Those on the periphery were barely half-formed, like acid-etched gargoyles. The air was pungent with the resin of worked woods.
‘I don’t think the prisoner will amount to much,’ Clavain said. ‘His identity isn’t apparent yet, but he seems to be some kind of pig criminal. We trawled him, retrieved clear and recent memory patterns that show him murdering people. I’ll spare you the details, but he’s creative, I’ll give him that. It’s not true what they say about pigs having no imagination.’
‘I never thought it was, Clavain. What about the other matter, the woman I hear you saved?’
‘Ah. Funny how word gets around.’ Then he recalled that it had been he who had told the children about Antoinette Bax.
‘Was she surprised?’
‘I don’t know. Should she have been?’
Felka snorted. She floated in the middle of the chamber, a bloated planet attended by many delicate wooden moons. She wore baggy brown work clothes. At least a dozen partially worked objects were guyed to her waist by nylon filaments. Other lines were hooked into woodworking tools, which ranged from broaches and files to lasers and tiny tethered burrowing robots.
I imagine she expected to die,‘ Clavain said. ’Or at the very least to be assimilated.‘
‘You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.’
‘It does give one pause for thought.’
Felka sighed, as if they had been over this a dozen times already. ‘How long have we known each other, Clavain?’
‘Longer than most people, I suppose.’
‘Yes. And for most of that time you were a soldier. Not always fighting, I’ll grant you that. But you were always a soldier a heart.’ Still with one eye on him, she hauled in one of her creations and peered through its latticed wooden interstices. ‘It strikes me that it might be a little late in the day for moral qualms, don’t you agree?’
‘You’re probably right.’
Felka bit her lower lip and, using a thicker line, propelled herself towards one wall of the chamber. Her entourage of wooden creations and tools clattered against each other as she moved. She set about making tea for Clavain.
‘You didn’t need to touch my face when I came in,’ Clavain remarked. ‘Should I take that as a good sign?’
‘In what way?’
‘It occurred to me that you might be getting better at discriminating faces.’
‘I’m not. Didn’t you notice the wall of faces on your way in?’
‘You must have done that recently,’ Clavain said.
‘When someone comes in here that I’m not sure about, I touch their face, mapping its contours with my ringers. Then I compare what I’ve mapped with the faces I’ve carved in the wall until I find a match. Then I read off the name. Of course, I have to add new faces now and then, and some need less detail than others…’
‘But me…?’
‘You have a beard, Clavain, and a great many lines. You have thin white hair. I could hardly fail to recognise you, could I? You’re not like any of the others.’
She passed him his bulb. He squeezed a stream of scalding tea into his throat. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much point denying it.’
He looked at her with as much detachment as he could muster, comparing the way she was now with his memory of her before he had left on Nightshade. It was only a matter of weeks, but in his estimation Felka had become more withdrawn, less a part of the world than at any time in recent memory. She spoke of visitors, but he had the strong suspicion that there had not been very many.
‘Clavain?’
‘Promise me something, Felka.’ He waited until she had turned to look at him. Her black hair, which she wore as long as Galiana had, was matted and greasy. Nodes of sleep dust nestled in the corners of her eyes. Her eyes were pale green, almost jade, the irises jarring against bloodshot pale pink. The skin beneath them was swollen and faintly blue, as if bruised. Like Clavain, Felka had a need for sleep that marked her as unusual amongst the Conjoined.
‘Promise you what, Clavain?’
‘If — when — it gets too bad, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
‘What good would it do?’
‘You know I’d always try to do my best for you, don’t you? Especially now that Galiana isn’t here for us.’
Her raw-rubbed eyes studied him. ‘You always did your best, Clavain. But you can’t help what I am. You can’t work miracles.’
He nodded sadly. It was true, but knowing it hardly helped.
Felka was not like the other Conjoiners. He had met her for the first time during his second trip to Galiana’s nest on Mars. The product of an aborted experiment in foetal brain manipulation, she had been a tiny damaged child, not merely unable to recognise faces, but unable to interact with other people at all. Her entire world revolved around a single endlessly absorbing game. Galiana’s nest had been encircled by a giant structure known as the Great Wall of Mars. The Wall was a failed terraforming project that had been damaged in an earlier war. Yet it had never collapsed, for Felka’s game involved coaxing the Wall’s self-repair mechanisms into activity, an endless, intricate process of identifying flaws and allocating precious repair resources. The two-hundred-kilometre-high Wall was at least as complex as a human body, and it was as if Felka controlled every single aspect of its healing mechanisms, from the tiniest cell upwards. Felka turned out to be much better at holding the Wall together than a mere machine. Though her mind was damaged to the point where she could not relate to people at all, she had an astonishing ability for complex tasks.
When the Wall had collapsed in the final assault by Clavain’s old comrades, the Coalition for Neural Purity, Galiana, Felka and he had made a last-ditch escape from the nest. Galiana had tried to dissuade him from taking Felka, warning him that without the Wall she would experience a state of deprivation far crueller than death itself. But Clavain had taken her anyway, convinced that there had to be some hope for the girl; that there had to be something else her mind could latch on to as a surrogate for the Wall.
He had been right, but it had taken many years to prove the point.
Through the years that followed — four hundred of them, although neither of them had experienced more than a century of subjective time — Felka had been coaxed and guided towards her current fragile state of mind. Subtle and delicate neural manipulation gave her back some of the brain functions that had been destroyed in the foetal intervention: language, and a growing sense that other people were more than mere automata. There were setbacks and failures — she had never learned to distinguish faces, for instance — but the triumphs outweighed them. Felka found other things to snare her mind, and during the long interstellar expedition she was happier than she had ever been. Every new world offered the prospect of a shatteringly difficult puzzle.
Eventually, however, she had decided to return home. There had been no rancour between her and Galiana, merely
a sense that it was time to begin collating the knowledge that she had helped gather so far, and that the best place to do so was the Mother Nest, with its vast analytic resources.
But she returned to find the Mother Nest embroiled in war. Clavain was soon off fighting the Demarchists, and Felka found that interpreting the data from the expedition was no longer viewed as a high-priority task.
Slowly, so slowly that it was barely evident from year to year, Clavain had watched her retreat back into her own private world. She had begun to play a less and less active role in Mother Nest affairs, isolating her mind from the other Conjoiners except on rare occasions. Things had only worsened when Galiana had come back, neither dead nor alive, but in some horrible intermediate state.
The wooden toys Felka surrounded herself with were symptoms of a desperate need to engage her mind with a problem worthy of her cognitive abilities. But for all that they held her interest, they were doomed to fail in the long run. Clavain had seen it happen already. He knew that what Felka needed was beyond his powers to give.
‘Perhaps when the war’s over…’ he said lamely. ‘If starflight becomes routine once more, and we start exploring again…’
‘Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil, Clavain.’
Felka took her own drinking bulb and cast off into the midst of her chamber. Absently, she began to chisel away at one of her solid compositions. The thing she was working on looked like a cube made from smaller cubes, with square gaps in some of the faces. She poked the chisel into one of these gaps and rasped back and forth, barely looking at the thing.
‘I’m not promising anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying I’ll do what I can.’
‘The Jugglers might not even be able to help me.’
‘Well, we won’t know until we try, will we?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Clavain said.
Something clunked inside the object she was working on. Felka hissed like a scalded cat and flung the ruined contraption at the nearest wall. It shattered into a hundred blocky pieces. Almost without hesitation she hauled in another piece and began working on that instead.
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