Geoffrey waited a while and then resumed his approach.
‘I told you I had to go away,’ he said. ‘Be glad I wasn’t gone longer.’
He took in her family. Hovering in the air, an aug layer had verified that all were present and correct, but it was only on the ground that he could look for signs of injury and illness. He paid particular attention to the youngsters, and saw nothing amiss.
‘So it’s all been business as usual,’ he said softly, as much for his own benefit as Matilda’s.
He found a tree-stump, squatted on it and drew out his sketchbook and 2B pencil. He worked with furious energy as the light ebbed, striving to capture the essence of the moment with as few pencil strokes as possible, like some mathematician searching for the quickest route to a theorem. No time for nuance or detail or shading; it was all about brutal economy and a devout, martial approach to the act of marking the paper. He drew until the gloom was absolute, the elephants no more than round-backed hillocks, grey shading into purple. His eyes had amped up, and the aug offered to drop an enhancement layer over his visual field, but Geoffrey declined.
When he had filled three pages he packed the sketchbook away, shouldered the bag and rose from the stump with aching bones. The elephants were calmer now, accepting his presence with benign indifference. He approached the matriarch, stood his ground and allowed her to examine him with her trunk.
‘You won’t believe where I’ve been,’ he told her. ‘Or maybe you would, if you were capable of understanding it. Maybe it wouldn’t seem much further away to you than Namibia. I was on the Moon, Matilda. How amazing is that? I was up there.’
He couldn’t see the Moon tonight, but he would have pointed it out to her if he’d been able.
Geoffrey voked the link, Matilda’s real-time brain scan appearing in the upper-left corner of his visual field. There was activity in all the usual functional areas, but nothing untoward. Her state of mind was as unexceptional as he had ever seen it, allowing for the normal patterns associated with nocturnal watchfulness.
He shouldn’t do it, he told himself. It was too soon after his return to proceed to the next step of initiating the full mind-to-mind link. But why not? He was supremely calm now, his mind settled by the flight and the placidity of the herd. Tomorrow might be different.
He voked his own brain image and began the transition. He pushed quickly through the low percentages, ten, twenty and beyond. At twenty-five per cent he felt his self-image losing definition, his mind decoupling from his body, his sense of scale undergoing a ballooning, dreamlike shift, Matilda losing size until she appeared no larger to him than one of the phyletic dwarves.
He passed through thirty-five per cent, then forty. The neural schematics showed areas of congruency, territories of brain lighting up in unison. The anatomical details were different, of course, but the functional relationships were precisely conserved. Matilda’s thought processes were guiding his own, moving fire around in his skull. He still felt calm and in control, aware that his mind was being influenced by an external agency yet retaining sufficient detachment not to be unnerved by the process. There was no fear – yet – even as he pushed through forty-five per cent and then hit the psychological barrier of fifty per cent, more than he had ever dared risk before. He didn’t just feel disconnected from his own body now; he felt multitudinous, part of a larger whole. Matilda’s identity as matriarch was so closely bound to her family that her identity encompassed other elephants. Geoffrey reeled, dizzy with the perceptual shifts, but he steeled himself and continued pushing through to fifty-five per cent, then sixty. He was a long way out now, swimming in deep neural waters. The world was coming through with the preternatural sharpness of a hallucination, dambursting his senses, flooding his brain with more stimulation than it could readily assimilate. The background noise of the waterhole and its surroundings was teased apart, deconstructed like the mathematical separation of a signal into its Fourier components, unwoven into threads of distinct and specific sound – each tree, each bush whispering its own contribution, each breath, each footfall a thing unto itself. Rumbles from elephants near and far, felt in his belly more than his head.
Yet that endless complex proclamation was only one part of the sensory tapestry. Matilda’s sense of smell was acute and untiring, and the link was lighting up Geoffrey’s olfactory centre accordingly. The translation was too crude to replicate the specific impressions, but Geoffrey nonetheless felt overwhelmed with smells drawn from his own experience, each of which arrived with an accompanying gift-wrapping of memories and emotions. The odour of freshly laid frond-carpet, in a newly furnished room at the household, when he was eight. The smell of transmission oil leaking from one of the jeeps. A box of paper-wrapped wax crayons, spectrum-ordered, like a perfumed rainbow waiting to spill its hues onto paper. Pushing his hand into a mound of fresh hyena dung when he’d tripped on the ground – and running crying into the household, holding his soiled hand as if he’d cut himself. The memories were usually of things that had happened to him when he was small, coming from old-growth brain structure, laid down when the architecture of his mind was still vigorously open to change.
Sixty-five per cent, seventy. That was enough for now, he told himself. It might even be enough for ever. Further refinements could follow – fine-tuning the interface so that the sense impressions were rendered more precisely, so that when Matilda smelled lion, he would smell lion too, and know it for what it was. It would only be a matter of building up data, cross-correlating neural states with external factors. There was no theoretical or philosophical reason why he couldn’t experience her world the way she did, with all its specificities. And then, only then, might he begin to glimpse something of her thought processes, if only in the play of shadows on the cave wall of her mind.
In all this, she had remained supremely calm and attentive, oblivious to the machines reading her mind; oblivious to the fact that her mind was being echoed and mirrored in another creature’s head. Geoffrey knew that this was the point where he should break off contact, having already achieved more than during any of his previous sessions. But another part of him wanted to forge ahead, now that he had overcome his initial fears. Not by pushing the percentage level higher, but by allowing traffic in the other direction. That had, after all, always been his ultimate goal: not just to peer into her mind, but to establish a communication channel. What was the phrase June Wing had used – a cognitive gate? The neuromachinery protocols were already in place; it would take no more than a sequence of voked commands to begin pushing his state of mind into Matilda’s head.
Was she ready for it, though? How would an animal cope, in the absence of any rational framework to temper its instinctive reactions? Nothing in her evolutionary past had equipped Matilda with the apparatus to grasp what he was contemplating doing to her.
Still, he hadn’t come this far with the project to allow such qualms to stop him now. The point was to conduct the experiment and
As a precautionary measure, he dialled the existing neural interface threshold back down to thirty per cent. It was low enough that his sense of self returned more or less to normal, but not so low that he couldn’t still feel Matilda’s sense-world bleeding into his own, with all its gaudy welter of multichannel impressions.
Five per cent in the other direction, he thought. That was more than enough to be starting with.
He thought about not doing it, of closing the link and returning to the Cessna. Then he thought of Sunday, how
