Redemption Ark

had placed a concrete thought in his head. You’ve got other things to take care of, I think.

[What did you do in the spaceship, Clavain?]

Clavain scratched his beard. He did not enjoy misleading children and had never quite got the hang of white lies. A mild distillation of the truth seemed the best approach. I helped someone.

[Whom did you help?]

A lady… a woman.

[Why did she need your help?]

Her ship — her spaceship — had got into trouble. She needed some assistance and I just happened to be passing by.

[What was the lady called?]

Bax. Antoinette Bax. I gave her a nudge with a rocket, to stop her falling back into a gas giant.

[Why was she coming out of the gas giant?]

I don’t really know, to tell the truth.

[Why did she have two names, Clavain?]

Because… This was going to get very messy, he realised. Look, um, I shouldn’t interrupt you, I really shouldn’t. He felt a palpable relaxation in the tutors’ emotional aura. So—um— who’s going to show me what a good flier they are, then?

It was all the spur that the children needed. A welter of voices crowded his skull, competing for his attention. [Me, Clavain, me!]

He watched them kick off into the void, barely able to contain themselves.

There was a moment when he was still peering into green infinity, and then the tender burst through a shimmer of leaves into a clearing. It had navigated the forest for another three or four minutes after leaving the children, knowing exactly where to find Felka.

The clearing was a spherical space enclosed on all sides by dense growth. One of the structural spars thrust its way clean through the volume, bulging with residential spaces. The tender whirred closer to the spar and then held station with its impellers while Clavain disembarked. Ladders and vines provided hand– and footholds, allowing him to work his way along the spar until he found the entrance to its hollow interior. There was some sense of vertigo, but it was slight. Part of his mind would probably always quail at the thought of clambering recklessly through what felt like a forest’s elevated canopy, but the years had diminished that nagging primate anxiety to the point where it was barely noticeable.

‘Felka…’ he called ahead. ‘It’s Clavain.’

There was no immediate answer. He burrowed deeper, descending — or ascending? — headfirst. ‘Felka…’

‘Hello, Clavain.’ Her voice boomed from the middle distance, echoed and amplified by the spar’s peculiar acoustics.

He followed the voice; he could not feel her thoughts. Felka did not participate routinely in the Conjoined mind-state, although that had not always been the case. But even if she had, Clavain would have maintained a certain distance. Long ago, by mutual consent, they had elected to exclude themselves from each other’s minds, except at the most trivial level. Anything else would have been an unwanted intimacy.

The shaft ended in a womblike interior space. This was where Felka spent most of her time these days, in her laboratory and atelier. The walls were a beguiling swirl of wooden growth patterns. To Clavain’s eye, the ellipses and knots resembled geodesic contours of highly stressed space-time. Lanterns glowed in sconces, throwing his shadow across the wood in threatening ogrelike shapes. He helped himself along by his fingertips, brushing past ornate wooden contraptions that floated untethered through the spar. Clavain recognised most of the objects well enough, but one or two looked new to him.

He snatched one from the air for closer examination. It rattled in his grasp. It was a human head fashioned from a single helix of wood; through the gaps in the spiral he could see another head inside, and another inside that one. Possibly there were more. He let the object go and seized another. This one was a sphere bristling with sticks, projecting out to various distances from the surface. Clavain adjusted one of the sticks and felt something click and move within the sphere, like the tumbler of a lock.

‘I see you’ve been busy, Felka,’ he said.

‘I gather I wasn’t the only one,’ she replied. ‘I heard reports. Some business about a prisoner?’

Clavain pawed past another barrage of wooden objects and rounded a corner in the spar. He squeezed through a connecting aperture into a small windowless chamber lit only by lanterns. Their light threw pinks and emeralds across the ochre and tan shades of the walls. One wall consisted entirely of numerous wooden faces, carved with mildly exaggerated features. Those on the periphery were barely half-formed, like acid-etched gargoyles. The air was pungent with the resin of worked woods.

‘I don’t think the prisoner will amount to much,’ Clavain said. ‘His identity isn’t apparent yet, but he seems to be some kind of pig criminal. We trawled him, retrieved clear and recent memory patterns that show him murdering people. I’ll spare you the details, but he’s creative, I’ll give him that. It’s not true what they say about pigs having no imagination.’

‘I never thought it was, Clavain. What about the other matter, the woman I hear you saved?’

‘Ah. Funny how word gets around.’ Then he recalled that it had been he who had told the children about Antoinette Bax.

‘Was she surprised?’

‘I don’t know. Should she have been?’

Felka snorted. She floated in the middle of the chamber, a bloated planet attended by many delicate wooden moons. She wore baggy brown work clothes. At least a dozen partially worked objects were guyed to her waist by nylon filaments. Other lines were hooked into woodworking tools, which ranged from broaches and files to lasers and tiny tethered burrowing robots.

I imagine she expected to die,‘ Clavain said. ’Or at the very least to be assimilated.‘

‘You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.’

‘It does give one pause for thought.’

Felka sighed, as if they had been over this a dozen times already. ‘How long have we known each other, Clavain?’

‘Longer than most people, I suppose.’

‘Yes. And for most of that time you were a soldier. Not always fighting, I’ll grant you that. But you were always a soldier a heart.’ Still with one eye on him, she hauled in one of her creations and peered through its latticed wooden interstices. ‘It strikes me that it might be a little late in the day for moral qualms, don’t you agree?’

‘You’re probably right.’

Felka bit her lower lip and, using a thicker line, propelled herself towards one wall of the chamber. Her entourage of wooden creations and tools clattered against each other as she moved. She set about making tea for Clavain.

‘You didn’t need to touch my face when I came in,’ Clavain remarked. ‘Should I take that as a good sign?’

‘In what way?’

‘It occurred to me that you might be getting better at discriminating faces.’

‘I’m not. Didn’t you notice the wall of faces on your way in?’

‘You must have done that recently,’ Clavain said.

‘When someone comes in here that I’m not sure about, I touch their face, mapping its contours with my ringers. Then I compare what I’ve mapped with the faces I’ve carved in the wall until I find a match. Then I read off the name. Of course, I have to add new faces now and then, and some need less detail than others…’

‘But me…?’

‘You have a beard, Clavain, and a great many lines. You have thin white hair. I could hardly fail to recognise you, could I? You’re not like any of the others.’

She passed him his bulb. He squeezed a stream of scalding tea into his throat. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much