the Martian surface 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 and 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 amongst the rabbits; other, older children were gathered around tree stumps whose sheared-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 with the children. The children’s clothes were a headache of bright, clashing colours and patterns. The Conjoiners crouched amongst them like ravens. Yet the children looked 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 was 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 apparently doing 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 per cent. 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 stump 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. ‘So 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 the chances were of him seeing the nursery just as one of the children was being promoted. Small, he judged — unless there was a crash programme 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 one’s 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 childproof doors until they reached a small circular room. The walls and ceiling were veined grey; tranquil after 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 particularly 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 around until she was facing another direction and carry on making the hand movements.
‘Her name’s Felka,’ Galiana said.
‘Hello, Felka…’ Clavain waited for a response, but none came. ‘I can see there’s something wrong with her.’
‘She’s 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 appeared 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 look alike to her. Can you imagine something stranger 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 was 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.
