Warren’s hesitation was more than just timelag. ‘No… I thought about it, of course, and high command agrees with me. Voi’s death was tragic — no escaping that. But she was only along as a neutral observer. If Galiana consents for you to stay, I suggest you do so.’
‘But you still say I only have three days?’
‘That’s up to Galiana, isn’t it? Have you learned much?’
‘You must be kidding. I’ve seen shuttles ready for launch, that’s all. I haven’t raised the Phobos proposal yet, either. The timing wasn’t exactly ideal, after what happened to Voi.’
‘Yes. If only we’d known about that Ouroborus infestation.’
Clavain leaned closer to the screen. ‘Yes. Why the hell didn’t we? Galiana assumed that we would, and I don’t blame her for that. We’ve had the nest under constant surveillance for fifteen years. Surely in all that time we’d have seen evidence of the worms?’
‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘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 to 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 not sure you do either, 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 on to his, 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 all right, 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 it from spreading to 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 re-enter 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 amongst 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. Amongst 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 overestimate, wasn’t it?’
‘You haven’t seen much of it 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 — deep under
