There was something else, but Clavain very nearly missed it. Setterholm had lived long enough to scratch out a message in the ice. Sheltered at the base of the glacier, the marks he had gouged were still legible. Three letters, it seemed to Clavain: an ‘I’, a ‘V’ and an ‘F’.
IVF.
The message meant nothing to Clavain, and even a deep search of the Conjoiner collective memory threw up only a handful of vaguely plausible candidates. The least ridiculous was ‘in vitro fertilisation’, but even that seemed to have no immediate connection with Setterholm. But then again, he had been a biologist, according to the base records. Did the message spell out the chilling truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?
But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact details of Setterholm’s death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway, just one more example of the way most of them had died: not by suicide or violence but through carelessness, recklessness or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures — like not wandering into a crevasse zone without the right equipment — had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all happened swiftly.
Galiana talked about it as if it was some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners speculated about an emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.
Clavain, while not discounting his friends’ theories, could not help but think of the worms. They were everywhere, after all, and the Americans had certainly been interested in them — Setterholm especially. Clavain himself had pressed his faceplate against the ice and observed that the worms reached down to the depth where the man had died. Their fine burrowing trails scratched into the vertical ice walls like the branchings of a river delta, with dark nodes of breeding tangles at the intersections of the larger tunnels. The tiny black worms had infested the glacier completely, and this would only be one distinct colony out of the millions that existed throughout Diadem’s frozen regions. The worm biomass in this single colony must have been several dozen tonnes at the very least. Had the Americans’ studies of the worms unleashed something that shattered the mind, turning them all into stumbling fools?
He sensed Galiana’s quiet presence at the back of his thoughts, where she had not been a moment earlier.
‘Nevil,’ she said. ‘We’re ready to leave again.’
‘You’re done with the ruin already?’
‘It isn’t very interesting — just a few equipment shacks. There are still some remains to the north we have to look over, and it’d be good to get there before nightfall.’
‘But I’ve only been gone half an hour or—’
‘Two hours, Nevil.’
He checked his wrist display disbelievingly, but Galiana was right: he had been out alone on the glacier for all that time. Time away from the others always seemed to fly by, like sleep to an exhausted man. Perhaps the analogy was accurate, at that: sleep was when the mammalian brain took a rest from the business of processing the external universe, allowing the accumulated experience of the day to filter down into long-term memory; collating useful memories and discarding what did not need to be remembered. And for Clavain — who still needed normal sleep — these periods away from the others were when his mind took a rest from the business of engaging in frantic neural communion with the other Conjoiners. He could almost feel his neurons breathing a vast collective groan of relief, now that all they had to do was process the thoughts of a single mind.
Two hours was nowhere near enough.
‘I’ll be back shortly,’ Clavain said. ‘I just want to pick up some more worm samples, then I’ll be on my way.’
‘You’ve picked up hundreds of the damned things already, Nevil, and they’re all the same, give or take a few trivial differences. ’
‘I know. But it can’t hurt to indulge an old man’s irrational fancies, can it?’
As if to justify himself, he knelt down and began scooping surface ice into a small sample container. The leech-like worms riddled the ice so thoroughly that he was bound to have picked up a few individuals in this sample, even though he would not know for sure until he got back to the shuttle’s lab. If he was lucky, the sample might even hold a breeding tangle: a knot of several dozen worms engaged in a slow, complicated orgy of cannibalism and sex. There, he would complete the same comprehensive scans he had run on all the other worms he had picked up, trying to guess just why the Americans had devoted so much effort to studying them. And doubtless he would get exactly the same results he had found previously. The worms never changed; there was no astonishing mutation buried in every hundredth or even thousandth specimen; no stunning biochemical trickery going on inside them. They secreted a few simple enzymes and they ate pollen grains and ice-bound algae and they wriggled their way through cracks in the ice, and when they met other worms they obeyed the brainless rules of life, death and procreation.
That was all they did.
Galiana, in other words, was right: the worms had simply become an excuse for him to spend time away from the rest of the Conjoiners.
At the beginning of the expedition, a month ago, it had been much easier to justify these excursions. Even some of the true Conjoined had been drawn by a primal human urge to walk out into the wilderness, surrounding themselves with kilometres of beautifully tinted, elegantly fractured, unthinking ice. It was good to be somewhere quiet and pristine after the war-torn solar system they had left behind.
Diadem was an Earth-like planet orbiting the star Ross 248. It had oceans, ice caps, plate tectonics and signs of reasonably advanced multi-cellular life. Plants had already invaded Diadem’s land, and some animals — the equivalents of arthropods, molluscs and worms — had begun to follow in their wake. The largest land-based animals were still small by terrestrial standards, since nothing in the oceans had yet evolved an internal skeleton. There was nothing that showed any signs of intelligence, but that was only a minor disappointment. It would still take a lifetime’s study just to explore the fantastic array of body-plans, metabolisms and survival strategies Diadem life had blindly evolved.
Yet even before Galiana had sent down the first survey shuttles, a shattering truth had become apparent.
Someone had reached Diadem before them.
The signs were unmistakable: glints of refined metal on the surface, picked out by radar. Upon inspection from orbit they turned out to be ruined structures and equipment, obviously of human origin.
‘It’s not possible,’ Clavain had said. ‘We’re the first. We have to be the first. No one else has ever built anything like the Sandra Voi; nothing capable of travelling this far.’
‘Somewhere in there,’ Galiana had answered, ‘I think there might be a mistaken assumption, don’t you?’
Meekly, Clavain had nodded.
Now — later still than he had promised — Clavain made his way back to the waiting shuttle. The red carpet of safety led straight to the access ramp beneath the craft’s belly. He climbed up and stepped through the transparent membrane that spanned the entrance door, most of his suit slithering away on contact with the membrane. By the time he was inside the ship he wore only a lightweight breather mask and a few communications devices. He could have survived outside naked for many minutes — Diadem’s atmosphere now had enough oxygen to support humans — but Galiana refused to allow any intermingling of micro-organisms.
He returned the equipment to a storage locker, placed the worm sample in a refrigeration rack and clothed himself in a paper-thin black tunic and trousers, before moving into the aft compartment where Galiana was waiting.
She and Felka were sitting facing each other across the blank-walled, austerely furnished room. They were staring into the space between them without quite meeting each other’s eyes. They looked like a mother and daughter locked in argumentative stalemate, but Clavain knew better.
He issued the mental command, well rehearsed now, that opened his mind to communion with the others. It
