Alastiar Reynolds

core on countless occasions, the scent nonetheless made Clavain think not of those previous visits but of his childhood. He could not say when or where, but he had certainly walked through a forest that had this quality. It had been somewhere on Earth — Scotland, perhaps.
There was no gravity in the core, but the vegetation that filled it was not a free-floating mass. Threading the sphere from side to side were spars of oak up to three kilometres long. The spars branched and merged randomly, forming a wooden cytoskeleton of pleasing complexity. Here and there the spars bulged sufficiently to accommodate enclosed spaces, hollows that glowed with pastel lantern-light. Elsewhere, a cobweb of smaller strands provided a structural mesh to which most of the greenery was anchored. The whole assemblage was festooned with irrigation pipes and nutrient feedlines, threading back into the support machinery lurking at the very heart of the core. Sun lamps studded the membrane at irregular intervals, and were distributed throughout the green masses themselves. Now they shone with the hard blue light of high noon, but as the day progressed — they were slaved to twenty-six-hour Yellowstone time — the lamps would slide down through the spectrum towards the bronze and russet reds of evening.
Eventually night would fall. The spherical forest would come alive with the chirrups and calls of a thousand weirdly evolved nocturnal animals. Squatting on a spar near its heart during nightfall, it would be easy to believe that the forest reached away in all directions for thousands of kilometres. The distant centrifugal wheels were only visible from the last hundred metres of greenery beneath the membrane, and they were, of course, utterly silent.
The tender dodged through the mass, knowing precisely where it had to take Clavain. Now and then he saw other Conjoiners, but they were mostly children or the elderly. The children were born and raised in the one-gee triplet, but when they were six months old they were brought here at regular intervals. Supervised by the elderly, they learned the muscle and orientation skills necessary for weightlessness. For most of them it was a game, but the very best would be earmarked for duty in the arena of space war. A few, a very few, showed such heightened spatial skills that they would be steered towards battle planning.
The elderly were too frail to spend much time in the high-gee rings. Once they had come to the core, they often never left. Clavain passed a couple now. They both wore support rigs, medical harnesses that doubled as propulsion packs. Their legs trailed behind them like afterthoughts. They were coaxing a quintet of children into kicking off from one side of a woody hollow into open space.
Seen without augmented vision, the scene had a tangibly sinister quality. The children were garbed in black suits and helmets that protected their skin against sharp branches. Their eyes were hidden behind black goggles, making it difficult to interpret their expressions. The elderly were equally drab, though they wore no helmets. But their fully visible faces betrayed nothing resembling enjoyment. To Clavain they looked like undertakers engaged in some solemn burial duty that would be ruined by the slightest hint of levity.
Clavain willed his implants to reveal the truth. There was a moment of florid growth as bright structures blossomed into existence out of thin air. The children wore filmy clothes now, marked with tribal swirls and zigzags of lurid colour. Their heads were bare, unencumbered by helmets. Two were boys; three were girls. He judged their ages to lie between five and seven. Their expressions were not entirely joyous, but neither were they miserable or neutral. Instead, they all looked slightly scared and slightly exhilarated. No doubt there was some rivalry going on, each child weighing the benefits and risks of being the first to take the aerial plunge.
The elderly couple still looked much the same, but now Clavain was attuned to the thoughts they were radiating. Bathed in an aura of encouragement, their faces now looked serene and patient rather than dour. They were quite prepared to wait hours for the children.
The environment itself had also changed. The air was full of jewel-bright butterflies and dragonflies, darting to and fro on busy trajectories. Neon caterpillars worked their way through the greenery. Hummingbirds hovered and translated from flower to flower, moving like precisely programmed clockwork toys. Monkeys, lemurs and flying squirrels jumped into free space with abandon, their eyes gleaming like marbles.
This was what the children perceived, and what Clavain was tuned into. They had known no other world but this storybook abstraction. Subtly, as they aged, the data reaching their brains would be manipulated. They would never notice the change from day to day, but the creatures haunting the forest’s spaces would gradually grow more realistic, their colours dimming to naturalistic greens and browns, blacks and whites. The creatures would become smaller and more elusive. Eventually, only the real animals would remain. Then — the children would be ten or eleven at this point — they would be gently educated about the machines that had doctored their view of the world so far. They would learn of their implants, and how they enabled a second layer to be draped over reality, one that could be shaped into any form imaginable.
For Clavain the educational process had been somewhat more brutal. It had been during his second visit to Galiana’s nest on Mars. She had shown him the nursery where the young Conjoiners were being instructed, but at that point he had not possessed any implants of his own. Then he had been injured, and Galiana had filled his head with medichines. He still remembered the heart-stopping moment when he had first experienced his subjective reality being manipulated. The feeling of his own skull being gate-crashed by numerous other minds had only been part of it, but perhaps the most shocking element had been his first glimpse of the realm the Conjoiners walked through. The psychologists had a term for it — cognitive breakthrough — but few of them could have experienced it for themselves.
Suddenly he drew the attention of the children.
note 63 One of the boys had pushed a thought into his head.
Clavain made the tender come to a halt in the middle of the space the children were using for flying lessons. He orientated the tender so that he was more or less level with them.
Hello . Clavain gripped the handrail in front of him like a preacher at a pulpit.
A girl looked at him intently. note 64
Outside . He eyed the tutors carefully.
note 65 the girl persisted.
He was unsure how to answer. He did not remember how much knowledge the children possessed at this age. Certainly, they knew nothing of the war. But it was difficult to discuss one thing without it leading to another. Beyond the Mother Nest, yes .
note 66
Yes. In a very big spaceship.
note 67 the girl asked.
One day, I expect. Not today though . He felt the tutors’ disquiet, though neither had placed a concrete thought in his head. You’ve got other things to take care of, I think .
note 68
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