Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 3

  “Meaning, maybe the worms weren’t always there.”

  Conscious that there could be nothing private about this conversation—but unwilling to drop the thread—Clavain said: “You think the Conjoiners put them there to ambush us?”

  “I’m saying we shouldn’t disregard any possibility, no matter how unpalatable.”

  “Galiana would never do something like that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” She had just stepped back into the room. “And I’m disappointed that you’d even debate the possibility.”

  Clavain terminated the link with Deimos. “Eavesdropping’s not a very nice habit, you know.”

  “What did you expect me to do?”

  “Show some trust? Or is that too much of a stretch?”

  “I never had to trust you when you were my prisoner,” Galiana said. “That made our relationship infinitely simpler. Our roles were completely defined.”

  “And now? If you distrust me so completely, why did you ever agree to my visit? Plenty of other specialists could have come in my place. You could even have refused any dialogue.”

  “Voi’s people pressured us to allow your visit,” Galiana said. “Just as they pressured your side into delaying hostilities a little longer.”

  “Is that all?”

  She hesitated slightly now. “I…knew you.”

  “Knew me? Is that how you sum up a year of imprisonment? What about the thousands of conversations we had; the times when we put aside our differences to talk about something other than the damned war? You kept me sane, Galiana. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s why I’ve risked my life to come here and talk you out of another provocation.”

  “It’s completely different now.”

  “Of course!” He forced himself not to shout. “Of course it’s different. But not fundamentally. We can still build on that bond of trust and find a way out of this crisis.”

  “But does your side really want a way out of it?”

  He did not answer her immediately; wary of what the truth might mean. “I’m not sure. But I’m also not sure you do, or else you wouldn’t keep pushing your luck.” Something snapped inside him and he asked the question he had meant to ask in a million better ways. “Why do you keep doing it, Galiana? Why do you keep launching those ships when you know they’ll be shot down as soon as they leave the nest?”

  Her eyes locked onto his own, unflinchingly. “Because we can. Because sooner or later one will succeed.”

  Clavain nodded. It was exactly the sort of thing he had feared she would say.

  SHE LED HIM through more grey-walled corridors, descending several levels deeper into the nest. Light poured from snaking strips embedded into the walls like arteries. It was possible that the snaking design was decorative, but Clavain thought it much more likely that the strips had simply grown that way, expressing biological algorithms. There was no evidence that the Conjoiners had attempted to enliven their surroundings; to render them in any sense human.

  “It’s a terrible risk you’re running,” Clavain said.

  “And the status quo is intolerable. I’ve every desire to avoid another war, but if it came to one, we’d at least have the chance to break these shackles.”

  “If you didn’t get exterminated first…”

  “We’d avoid that. In any case, fear plays no part in our thinking. You saw the man accept his fate on the dyke, when he understood that your death would harm us more than his own. He altered his state of mind to one of total acceptance.”

  “Fine. That makes it alright, then.”

  She halted. They were alone in one of the snakingly-lit corridors; he had seen no other Conjoiners since the hangar. “It’s not that we regard individual lives as worthless, any more than you would willingly sacrifice a limb. But now that we’re part of something larger…”

  “Transenlightenment, you mean?”

  It was the Conjoiners’ term for the state of neural communion they shared, mediated by the machines swarming in their skulls. Whereas Demarchists used implants to facilitate real-time democracy, Conjoiners used them to share sensory data, memories—even conscious thought itself. That was what had precipitated the war. Back in 2190 half of humanity had been hooked into the system-wide data nets via neural implants. Then the Conjoiner experiments had exceeded some threshold, unleashing a transforming virus into the nets. Implants had begun to change, infecting millions of minds with the templates of Conjoiner thought. Instantly the infected had become the enemy. Earth and the other inner planets had always been more conservative, preferring to access the nets via traditional media.

  Once they saw communities on Mars and in the asteroid belts fall prey to the Conjoiner phenomenon, the Coalition powers hurriedly pooled their resources to prevent the spread reaching their own states. The Demarchists, out around the gas giants, had managed to get firewalls up before many of their habitats were lost. They had chosen neutrality while the Coalition tried to contain—some said sterilise—zones of Conjoiner takeover. Within three years—after some of the bloodiest battles in human experience—the Conjoiners had been pushed back to a clutch of hideaways dotted around the system. Yet all along they professed a kind of puzzled bemusement that their spread was being resisted. After all, no one who had been assimilated seemed to regret it. Quite the contrary. The few prisoners whom the Conjoiners had reluctantly returned to their pre-infection state had sought every means to return to the fold. Some had even chosen suicide rather than be denied Transenlightenment. Like acolytes given a vision of heaven, they devoted their entire waking existence to the search for another glimpse.

  “Transenlightenment blurs our sense of self,” Galiana said. “When the man elected to die, the sacrifice was not absolute for him. He understood that much of what he was had already achieved preservation among the rest of us.”

  “But he was just one man. What about the hundred lives you’ve thrown away with your escape attempts? We know—we’ve counted the bodies.”

  “Replacements can always be cloned.”

  Clavain hoped that he hid his disgust satisfactorily. Among his people the very notion of cloning was an unspeakable atrocity; redolent with horror. To Galiana it would be just another technique in her arsenal. “But you don’t clone, do you? And you’re losing people. We thought there would be nine hundred of you in this nest, but that was a gross over-estimate, wasn’t it?”

  “You haven’t seen much yet,” Galiana said.

  “No, but this place smells deserted. You can’t hide absence, Galiana. I bet there aren’t more than a hundred of you left here.”

  “You’re wrong,” Galiana said. “We have cloning technology, but we’ve hardly ever used it. What would be the point? We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.”

  “Right.” The last thing he needed now was a dose of Conjoiner rhetoric. “So where the hell is everyone?”

  In a while he had part of the answer, if not the whole of it. At the end of the maze of corridors—far under Mars now—Galiana brought him to a nursery.

  It was shockingly unlike his expectations. Not only did it not match what he had imagined from the vantage point of Deimos, but it jarred against his predictions based on what he had seen so far of the nest. In Deimos, he had assumed a Conjoiner nursery would be a place of grim medical efficiency; all gleaming machines with babies plugged in like peripherals, like a monstrously productive doll factory. Within the nest, he had revised his model to allow for the depleted numbers of Conjoiners. If there was a nursery, it was obviously not very productive. Fewer babies, then—but still a vision of hulking grey machines, bathed in snaking light.

  The nursery was nothing like that.

  The huge room Galiana showed him was almost painfully bright and cheerful; a child’s fantasy of friendly shapes and primary colours. The walls and ceiling projected a holographic sky: infinite blue a
nd billowing clouds of heavenly white. The floor was an undulating mat of synthetic grass forming hillocks and meadows. There were banks of flowers and forests of bonsai trees. There were robot animals: fabulous birds and rabbits just slightly too anthropomorphic to fool Clavain. They were like the animals in children’s books; big-eyed and happy-looking. Toys were scattered on the grass.

  And there were children. They numbered between forty and fifty; spanning by his estimate ages from a few months to six or seven standard years. Some were crawling among the rabbits; other, older children were gathered around tree stumps whose sheered-off surfaces flickered rapidly with images, underlighting their faces. They were talking amongst themselves, giggling or singing. He counted perhaps half a dozen adult Conjoiners kneeling among the children. The children’s clothes were a headache of bright, clashing colours and patterns. The Conjoiners crouched among them like ravens. Yet the children seemed at ease with them, listening attentively when the adults had something to say.

  “This isn’t what you thought it would be like, is it.”

  “No…not at all.” There seemed no point lying to her. “We thought you’d raise your young in a simplified version of the machine-generated environment you experience.”

  “In the early days that’s more or less what we did.” Subtly, Galiana’s tone of voice had changed. “Do you know why chimpanzees are less intelligent than humans?”

  He blinked at the change of tack. “I don’t know—are their brains smaller?”

  “Yes—but a dolphin’s brain is larger, and they’re scarcely more intelligent than dogs.” Galiana stooped next to a vacant tree stump. Without seeming to do anything, she made a diagram of mammal brain anatomies appear on the trunk’s upper surface, then sketched her finger across the relevant parts. “It’s not overall brain volume that counts so much as the developmental history. The difference in brain volume between a neonatal chimp and an adult is only about twenty percent. By the time the chimp receives any data from beyond the womb, there’s almost no plasticity left to use. Similarly, dolphins are born with almost their complete repertoire of adult behaviour already hardwired. A human brain, on the other hand, keeps growing through years of learning. We inverted that thinking. If data received during post-natal growth was so crucial to intelligence, perhaps we could boost our intelligence even further by intervening during the earliest phases of brain development.”

  “In the womb?”

  “Yes.” Now she made the tree-trunk show a human embryo running through cycles of cell-division, until the faint fold of a rudimentary spinal nerve began to form, nubbed with the tiniest of emergent minds. Droves of subcellular machines swarmed in, invading the nascent nervous system. Then the embryo’s development slammed forward, until Clavain was looking at an unborn human baby.

  “What happened?”

  “It was a grave error,” Galiana said. “Instead of enhancing normal neural development, we impaired it terribly. All we ended up with were various manifestations of savant syndrome.”

  Clavain looked around him. “Then you let these kids develop normally?”

  “More or less. There’s no family structure, of course, but then again there are plenty of human and primate societies where the family is less important in child development than the cohort group. So far we haven’t seen any pathologies.”

  Clavain watched as one of the older children was escorted out of the grassy room, through a door in the sky. When the Conjoiner reached the door the child hesitated, tugging against the man’s gentle insistence. The child looked back for a moment, then followed the man through the gap.

  “Where’s that child going?”

  “To the next stage of its development.”

  Clavain wondered what were the chances of him seeing the nursery just as one of the children was being promoted. Small, he judged—unless there was a crash program to rush as many of them through as quickly as possible. As he thought about this, Galiana took him into another part of the nursery. While this room was smaller and dourer it was still more colourful than any other part of the nest he had seen before the grassy room. The walls were a mosaic of crowded, intermingling displays, teeming with moving images and rapidly scrolling text. He saw a herd of zebra stampeding through the core of a neutron star. Elsewhere an octopus squirted ink at the face of a twentieth-century despot. Other display facets rose from the floor like Japanese paper screens, flooded with data. Children—up to early teenagers—sat on soft black toadstools next to the screens in little groups, debating.

  A few musical instruments lay around unused: holoclaviers and air-guitars. Some of the children had grey bands around their eyes and were poking their fingers through the interstices of abstract structures, exploring the dragon-infested waters of mathematical space. Clavain could see what they were manipulating on the flat screens: shapes that made his head hurt even in two dimensions.

  “They’re nearly there,” Clavain said. “The machines are outside their heads, but not for long. When does it happen?”

  “Soon; very soon.”

  “You’re rushing them, aren’t you. Trying to get as many children Conjoined as you can. What are you planning?”

  “Something…has arisen, that’s all. The timing of your arrival is either very bad or very fortunate, depending on your point of view.” Before he could query her, Galiana added: “Clavain; I want you to meet someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone very precious to us.”

  She took him through a series of child-proof doors until they reached a small circular room. The walls and ceiling were veined grey; tranquil after what he had seen in the last place. A child sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room. Clavain estimated the girl’s age as ten standard years—perhaps fractionally older. But she did not respond to Clavain’s presence in any way an adult, or even a normal child, would have. She just kept on doing the thing she had been doing when they stepped inside, as if they were not really present at all. It was not at all clear what she was doing. Her hands moved before her in slow, precise gestures. It was as if she were playing a holoclavier or working a phantom puppet show. Now and then she would pivot round until she was facing another direction and carry on doing the hand movements.

  “Her name’s Felka,” Galiana said.

  “Hello, Felka…” He waited for a response, but none came. “I can see there’s something wrong with her.”

  “She was one of the savants. Felka developed with machines in her head. She was the last to be born before we realised our failure.”

  Something about Felka disturbed him. Perhaps it was the way she carried on regardless, engrossed in an activity to which she seemed to attribute the utmost significance, yet which had to be without any sane purpose.

  “She doesn’t seem aware of us.”

  “Her deficits are severe,” Galiana said. “She has no interest in other human beings. She has prosopagnosia; the inability to distinguish faces. We all seem alike to her. Can you imagine something more strange than that?”

  He tried, and failed. Life from Felka’s viewpoint must have been a nightmarish thing, surrounded by identical clones whose inner lives she could not begin to grasp. No wonder she seemed so engrossed in her game.

  “Why is she so precious to you?” Clavain asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  “She’s keeping us alive,” Galiana said.

  OF COURSE, HE asked Galiana what she meant by that. Galiana’s only response was to tell him that he was not yet ready to be shown the answer.

  “And what exactly would it take for me to reach that stage?”

  “A simple procedure.”

  Oh yes, he understood that part well enough. Just a few machines in the right parts of his brain and the truth could be his. Politely, doing his best to mask his distaste, Clavain declined. Fortunately, Galiana did not press the point, for the time had arrived for the meeting he had been promised before his arrival on Mars.

  He watched a subset of
the nest file in to the conference room. Galiana was their leader only inasmuch as she had founded the lab here from which the original experiment had sprung and was accorded some respect deriving from seniority. She was also the most obvious spokesperson among them. They all had areas of expertise which could not be easily shared among other Conjoined; very distinct from the hive-mind of identical clones which still figured in the Coalition’s propaganda. If the nest was in any way like an ant colony, then it was an ant colony in which every ant fulfilled a distinct role from all the others. Naturally, no individual could be solely entrusted with a particular skill essential to the nest—that would have been dangerous over-specialisation—but neither had individuality been completely subsumed into the group mind.

  The conference room must have dated back to the days when the nest was a research outpost, or even earlier, when it was some kind of mining base in the early 2100s. It was much too big for the dour handful of Conjoiners who stood round the main table. Tactical readouts around the table showed the build-up of strike forces above the Martian exclusion zone; probable drop trajectories for ground-force deployment.

  “Nevil Clavain,” Galiana said, introducing him to the others. Everyone sat down. “I’m just sorry that Sandra Voi can’t be with us now. We all feel the tragedy of her death. But perhaps out of this terrible event we can find some common ground. Nevil; before you came here you told us you had a proposal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.”

  “I’d really like to hear it,” one of the others murmured audibly.

  Clavain’s throat was dry. Diplomatically, this was quicksand. “My proposal concerns Phobos…”

  “Go on.”

  “I was injured there,” he said. “Very badly. Our attempt to clean out the worm infestation failed and I lost some good friends. That makes it personal between me and the worms. But I’d accept anyone’s help to finish them off.”

  Galiana glanced quickly at her compatriots before answering. “A joint assault operation?”