point denying it.’
He looked at her with as much detachment as he could muster, comparing the way she was now with his memory of her before he had left on
‘Clavain?’
‘Promise me something, Felka.’ He waited until she had turned to look at him. Her black hair, which she wore as long as Galiana had, was matted and greasy. Nodes of sleep dust nestled in the corners of her eyes. Her eyes were pale green, almost jade, the irises jarring against bloodshot pale pink. The skin beneath them was swollen and faintly blue, as if bruised. Like Clavain, Felka had a need for sleep that marked her as unusual amongst the Conjoined.
‘Promise you what, Clavain?’
‘If — when — it gets too bad, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
‘What good would it do?’
‘You know I’d always try to do my best for you, don’t you? Especially now that Galiana isn’t here for us.’
Her raw-rubbed eyes studied him. ‘You always did your best, Clavain. But you can’t help what I am. You can’t work miracles.’
He nodded sadly. It was true, but knowing it hardly helped.
Felka was not like the other Conjoiners. He had met her for the first time during his second trip to Galiana’s nest on Mars. The product of an aborted experiment in foetal brain manipulation, she had been a tiny damaged child, not merely unable to recognise faces, but unable to interact with other people at all. Her entire world revolved around a single endlessly absorbing game. Galiana’s nest had been encircled by a giant structure known as the Great Wall of Mars. The Wall was a failed terraforming project that had been damaged in an earlier war. Yet it had never collapsed, for Felka’s game involved coaxing the Wall’s self-repair mechanisms into activity, an endless, intricate process of identifying flaws and allocating precious repair resources. The two-hundred-kilometre-high Wall was at least as complex as a human body, and it was as if Felka controlled every single aspect of its healing mechanisms, from the tiniest cell upwards. Felka turned out to be much better at holding the Wall together than a mere machine. Though her mind was damaged to the point where she could not relate to people at all, she had an astonishing ability for complex tasks.
When the Wall had collapsed in the final assault by Clavain’s old comrades, the Coalition for Neural Purity, Galiana, Felka and he had made a last-ditch escape from the nest. Galiana had tried to dissuade him from taking Felka, warning him that without the Wall she would experience a state of deprivation far crueller than death itself. But Clavain had taken her anyway, convinced that there had to be some hope for the girl; that there had to be something else her mind could latch on to as a surrogate for the Wall.
He had been right, but it had taken many years to prove the point.
Through the years that followed — four hundred of them, although neither of them had experienced more than a century of subjective time — Felka had been coaxed and guided towards her current fragile state of mind. Subtle and delicate neural manipulation gave her back some of the brain functions that had been destroyed in the foetal intervention: language, and a growing sense that other people were more than mere automata. There were setbacks and failures — she had never learned to distinguish faces, for instance — but the triumphs outweighed them. Felka found other things to snare her mind, and during the long interstellar expedition she was happier than she had ever been. Every new world offered the prospect of a shatteringly difficult puzzle.
Eventually, however, she had decided to return home. There had been no rancour between her and Galiana, merely a sense that it was time to begin collating the knowledge that she had helped gather so far, and that the best place to do so was the Mother Nest, with its vast analytic resources.
But she returned to find the Mother Nest embroiled in war. Clavain was soon off fighting the Demarchists, and Felka found that interpreting the data from the expedition was no longer viewed as a high-priority task.
Slowly, so slowly that it was barely evident from year to year, Clavain had watched her retreat back into her own private world. She had begun to play a less and less active role in Mother Nest affairs, isolating her mind from the other Conjoiners except on rare occasions. Things had only worsened when Galiana had come back, neither dead nor alive, but in some horrible intermediate state.
The wooden toys Felka surrounded herself with were symptoms of a desperate need to engage her mind with a problem worthy of her cognitive abilities. But for all that they held her interest, they were doomed to fail in the long run. Clavain had seen it happen already. He knew that what Felka needed was beyond his powers to give.
‘Perhaps when the war’s over…’ he said lamely. ‘If starflight becomes routine once more, and we start exploring again…’
‘Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil, Clavain.’
Felka took her own drinking bulb and cast off into the midst of her chamber. Absently, she began to chisel away at one of her solid compositions. The thing she was working on looked like a cube made from smaller cubes, with square gaps in some of the faces. She poked the chisel into one of these gaps and rasped back and forth, barely looking at the thing.
‘I’m not promising anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying I’ll do what I can.’
‘The Jugglers might not even be able to help me.’
‘Well, we won’t know until we try, will we?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Clavain said.
Something clunked inside the object she was working on. Felka hissed like a scalded cat and flung the ruined contraption at the nearest wall. It shattered into a hundred blocky pieces. Almost without hesitation she hauled in another piece and began working on that instead.
‘And if the Pattern Jugglers don’t help, we could try the Shrouders.’
Clavain smiled. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If the Jugglers don’t work, then we can think about other possibilities. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. There’s the small matter of winning a war first.’
‘But they say it will soon be over.’
‘They do, don’t they?’
Felka slipped with the tool she was using and gouged a little flap of skin from the side of her finger. She pressed the finger against her mouth and sucked on it hard, like someone working the last drop of juice from a lemon. ‘What makes you think otherwise?’
He felt an absurd urge to lower his voice, even though it made no practical difference. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just being a silly old fool. But what are silly old fools for, if not to have the occasional doubt now and then?’
Felka smiled tolerantly. ‘Stop speaking in riddles, Clavain.’
‘It’s Skade and the Closed Council. Something’s going on and I don’t know what it is.’
‘Such as?’
Clavain chose his words carefully. As much as he trusted Felka, he knew that he was dealing with a member of the Closed Council. The fact that she had not participated in the Council for some time, and was presumably out of the loop on its latest secrets, did not count for much.
‘We stopped building ships a century ago. No one ever told me why, and I quickly realised it wasn’t much use asking. In the meantime I heard the odd rumour of mysterious goings-on: secret initiatives, secret technology- acquisition programmes, secret experiments. Then suddenly, just when the Demarchists are about to cave in and admit defeat, the Closed Council unveils a brand-new starship design.
“They”, Clavain?‘
‘I mean us.’
Felka nodded. ‘But you occasionally wonder if the Closed Council isn’t planning something behind the scenes.’
Clavain sipped at his tea. ‘I’m entitled to wonder, aren’t I?’
Felka was quiet for several long moments, the silence interrupted only by the rasp of her file against wood. ‘I could answer some of your questions here and now, Clavain. You know that. You also know that I won’t ever reveal
