was like opening a tiny aperture in the side of a dam: he was never adequately prepared for the force with which the flow of data hit him. The room changed: colour bleeding out of the walls, lacing itself into abstract structures that permeated the room’s volume. Galiana and Felka, dressed dourly a moment earlier, were now veiled in light, and appeared superhumanly beautiful. He could feel their thoughts, as if he were overhearing a heated conversation in the room next door. Most of it was non-verbal; Galiana and Felka were playing an intense, abstract game. The thing floating between them was a solid lattice of light, resembling the plumbing diagram of an insanely complex refinery. It was constantly adjusting itself, with coloured flows racing this way and that as the geometry changed. About half the volume was green, the remainder lilac, but suddenly the former encroached dramatically on the latter.
Felka laughed; she was winning.
Galiana conceded and crashed back into her seat with a sigh of exhaustion, but she was smiling as well.
‘Sorry. I appear to have distracted you,’ Clavain said.
‘No; you just hastened the inevitable. I’m afraid Felka was always going to win.’
The girl smiled again, still saying nothing, though Clavain sensed her victory; a hard-edged thing, which for a moment outshone all other thoughts from her direction, eclipsing even Galiana’s air of weary resignation.
Felka had been a failed Conjoiner experiment in the manipulation of foetal brain development; a child with a mind more machine than human. When he had first met her — in Galiana’s nest on Mars — he had encountered a girl absorbed in a profound, endless game: directing the faltering self-repair processes of the terraforming structure known as the Great Wall of Mars, in which the nest sheltered. She had no interest in people — indeed, she could not even discriminate between faces. But when the nest was being evacuated, Clavain had risked his life to save hers, even though Galiana had told him that the kindest thing would be to let her die. As Clavain had struggled to adjust to life as part of Galiana’s commune, he had set himself the task of helping Felka to develop her latent humanity. She had begun to show signs of recognition in his presence, perhaps sensing on some level that they had a kinship; that they were both strangers stumbling towards a mysterious new light.
Galiana rose from her chair, carpets of light wrapping around her. ‘It was time to end the game, anyway. We’ve got work to do.’ She looked down at the girl, who was still staring at the lattice. ‘Sorry, Felka. Later, maybe.’
Clavain said, ‘How’s she doing?’
‘She’s laughing, Nevil. That has to be progress, doesn’t it?’
‘I’d say that depends what she’s laughing about.’
‘She beat me. She thought it was funny. I’d say that was a fairly human reaction, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d still be happier if I could convince myself she recognised my face, and not my smell, or the sound my footfalls make.’
‘You’re the only one of us with a beard, Nevil. It doesn’t take vast amounts of neural processing to spot that.’
Clavain scratched his chin self-consciously as they stepped through into the shuttle’s flight deck. He liked his beard, even though it was trimmed to little more than grey stubble so that he could slip a breather mask on without difficulty. It was as much a link to his past as his memories, or the wrinkles Galiana had studiously built into his remodelled body.
‘You’re right, of course. Sometimes I just have to remind myself how far we’ve come.’
Galiana smiled — she was getting better at that, though there was still something a little forced about it — and pushed her long, grey-veined black hair behind her ears. ‘I tell myself the same things when I think about you, Nevil.’
‘Mm. But I have come some way, haven’t I?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t got a considerable distance ahead of you. I could have put that thought into your head in a microsecond, if you allowed me to do so — but you still insist that we communicate by making noises in our throats, the way monkeys do.’
‘Well, it’s good practice for you,’ Clavain said, hoping that his irritation was not too obvious.
They settled into adjacent seats while avionics displays slithered into take-off configuration. Clavain’s implants allowed him to fly the machine without any manual inputs at all, but — old soldier that he was — he generally preferred tactile controls. So his implants obliged, hallucinating a joystick inset with buttons and levers, and when he reached out to grasp it, his hands appeared to close around something solid. He shuddered to think how thoroughly his perceptions of the real world were being doctored to support this illusion; but once he had been flying for a few minutes he generally forgot about it, lost in the joy of piloting.
He got them airborne, then settled the shuttle into level flight towards the fifth ruin they would be visiting that day. Kilometres of ice slid beneath them, only occasionally broken by a protruding ridge or a patch of dry, boulder-strewn ground.
‘Just a few shacks, you said?’
Galiana nodded. ‘A waste of time, but we had to check it out.’
‘Any closer to understanding what happened to them?’
‘They died, more or less overnight. Mostly through incidents related to the breakdown of normal thought — although one or two may simply have died, as if they had some greater susceptibility to a toxin than the others.’
Clavain smiled, feeling that a small victory was his. ‘Now you’re looking at a toxin, rather than a psychosis?’
‘A toxin’s difficult to explain, Nevil.’
‘From Martin Setterholm’s worms, perhaps?’
‘Not very likely. Their biohazard containment measures weren’t as good as ours — but they were still adequate. We’ve analysed those worms and we know they don’t carry anything obviously hostile to us. And even if there was a neurotoxin, how would it affect everyone so quickly? Even if the lab workers had caught something, they’d have fallen ill before anyone else did, sending a warning to the others — but nothing like that happened.’ She paused, anticipating Clavain’s next question. ‘And no, I don’t think that what happened to them is necessarily something we need worry about, though that doesn’t mean I’m going to rule anything out. But even our oldest technology’s a century ahead of the best they had — and we have the Sandra Voi to retreat to if we run into anything the medichines in our heads can’t handle.’
Clavain always did his best not to think too much about the swarms of subcellular machines lacing his brain — supplanting much of it, in fact — but there were times when it was unavoidable. He still had a squeamish reaction to the idea, though it was becoming milder. Now, though, he could not help but view the machines as his allies; as intimately a part of him as his immune system. Galiana was right: they would resist anything that tried to interfere with what now passed as the ‘normal’ functioning of his mind.
‘Still,’ he said, not yet willing to drop his pet theory, ‘you’ve got to admit something: the Americans — Setterholm especially — were interested in the worms. Too interested, if you ask me.’
‘Look who’s talking.’
‘Ah, but my interest is strictly forensic. And I can’t help but put the two things together. They were interested in the worms. And they went mad.’
This was an oversimplification, of course: it was clear enough that the worms had preoccupied only some of the Americans: those who were most interested in xeno-biology. According to the evidence the Conjoiners had so far gathered, the effort had been largely spearheaded by Setterholm, the man Clavain had found dead at the bottom of the crevasse. Setterholm had travelled widely across Diadem’s snowy wastes, gathering a handful of allies to assist in his work. He had found worms in dozens of ice fields, grouped into vast colonies. For the most part, the other members of the expedition had let him get on with his activities, even as they struggled with the day-to-day business of staying alive in what was still a hostile, alien environment.
Even before they had all died, things had been far from easy. The self-replicating robots that had brought them there in the first place had failed years before, leaving the delicate life-support systems of their shelters to slowly collapse; each malfunction a little more difficult to rectify than the last. Diadem was getting colder, too — sliding inexorably into a deep ice age. It had been the Americans’ misfortune to arrive at the onset of a great, centuries-long winter. Now, Clavain thought, it was colder still; the polar ice caps rushing towards each other like long-separated lovers.
