She bore this in mind when she looked at Remontoire’s face, deciding, provisionally, that he looked concerned. ‘Why isn’t he here now?’ ‘He wanted to give us time to discuss Closed Council matters.’ ‘Does he know anything about what happened in the chamber today?’ ‘Nothing.’ Felka drifted to the top of the maze and popped another mouse into the entrance, hoping to unblock a stalemate in the lower-left quadrant. ‘That’s the way it will have to continue, unless Clavain assents to join. Even then he may be disappointed at what he doesn’t get to know.’ I understand why you wouldn’t want him to know about Exordium,‘ Remontoire said. ‘What exactly is that supposed to mean?’ ‘You went against Galiana’s wishes, didn’t you? After what she discovered on Mars she discontinued Exordium. Yet when you returned from deep space — when she was still out there — you happily participated.’ ‘You’ve become quite an expert all of a sudden, Remontoire.’ ‘It’s all there in the Mother Nest’s archives, if you know where to look. The fact that the experiments took place isn’t much of a secret at all.’ Remontoire paused, watching the maze with mild interest. ‘Of course, what actually happened in Exordium — why Galiana called it off — that’s another matter entirely. There’s no mention in the archives of any messages from the future. What was so disturbing about those messages that their very existence couldn’t be acknowledged?’ ‘You’re just as curious as I was.’ ‘Of course. But was it just curiosity that made you go against her wishes, Felka? Or was there something more? An instinct to rebel against your own mother, perhaps?’ Felka held back her anger. ‘She wasn’t my mother, Remontoire. We shared some genetic material. That’s all we had in common. And no, it wasn’t rebellion either. I was looking for something else to engage my mind. Exordium was supposed to be about a new state of consciousness.’ ‘So you didn’t know about the messages either?’ ‘I had heard rumours, but I didn’t believe them. The easiest way to find out for myself seemed to be to participate. But I didn’t start Exordium again. The programme had already been resurrected before our return. Skade wanted me to join it — I think she thought the uniqueness of my mind might be of value to the programme. But I only played a small part in it, and I left almost as soon as I had begun.’ ‘Why — because it didn’t work the way you’d hoped?’ ‘No. As a matter of fact it worked very well. It was also the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.’ He smiled at her for a moment; then his smile slowly vanished. ‘Why, exactly?’ ‘I didn’t believe in the existence of evil before, Remontoire. Now I’m not so certain.’ He spoke as if he had misheard her. ‘Evil?’ ‘Yes,’ she said softly. Now that the subject had been raised she found herself remembering the smell and texture of the Exordium chamber as if it had been only yesterday, even though she had done all she could to steer her thoughts away from that sterile white room, unwilling to accept what she had learned within it. The experiments had been the logical conclusion to the work Galiana had initiated in her earliest days in the Martian labs. She had set out to enhance the human brain, believing that her work could only be for the greater good of humanity. As her model, Galiana used the development of the digital computer from its simple, slow infancy. Her first step had been to increase the computational power and speed of the human mind, just as the early computer engineers had traded clockwork for electromechanical switches; switches for valves; valves for transistors; transistors for microscopic solid-state devices; solid-state devices for quantum-level processing gates which hovered on the fuzzy edge of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. She invaded the brains of her subjects, including herself, with tiny machines that laid down connections between brain cells which exactly paralleled those already in place, but which were capable of transmitting nerve signals much more rapidly. With the normal neurotransmitter and nerve-signal events inhibited by drugs or more machines, Galiana’s secondary loom took over neural processing. The subjective effect was normal consciousness, but at an accelerated rate. It was as if the brain had been supercharged, able to process thoughts at a rate ten or fifteen times faster than an unaugmented mind. There were problems, enough to ensure that accelerated consciousness could not usually be sustained for more than a few seconds, but in most respects the experiments had been successful. Someone in the accelerated state could watch an apple fall from a table and compose a commemorative haiku before it reached the ground. They could watch the depressor and elevator muscles flex and twist in a hummingbird’s wing, or marvel at the crownlike impact pattern caused by a splashing drop of milk. They also, needless to say, made excellent soldiers. So Galiana had moved on to the next phase. The early computer engineers had discovered that certain classes of problem were best tackled by armies of computers locked together in parallel, sharing data between nodes. Galiana pursued this aim with her neurally enhanced subjects, establishing data-corridors between their minds. She allowed them to share memories, experiences, even the processing of certain mental tasks such as pattern recognition. It was this experiment running amok — jumping uncontrolled from mind to mind, subverting neural machines which were already in place — that led to the event known as the Transenlightenment and, not inconsequentially, to the first war against the Conjoiners. The Coalition for Neural Purity had wiped out Galiana’s allies, forcing her back into the seclusion of a small fortified huddle of labs tucked inside the Great Wall of Mars. It was there, in 2190, that she had met Clavain for the first time, when he had been her prisoner. It was there that Felka had been born, a few years later. And it was there that Galiana pushed on to the third phase of her experimentation. Still following the model of the early computer engineers, she now wished to explore what could be gained from a quantum-mechanical approach. The computer engineers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — barely out of the clockwork era, as far as Galiana was concerned — had used quantum principles to crack problems that would otherwise have been insoluble, such as the task of finding the prime factors of very large numbers. A conventional computer, even an army of conventional computers sharing the task, stood no chance of being able to find the prime factors before the effective end of the universe. And yet with the right equipment — an ungainly lash-up of prisms, lenses, lasers and optical processors on a lab bench — it was possible to do it in a few milliseconds. There had been fierce debate as to exactly what was happening, but not that the primes were being found. The simplest explanation, which Galiana had never seen any reason to doubt, was that the quantum computers were sharing the task between infinite copies of themselves, spread across parallel universes. It was conceptually staggering, but it was the only reasonable explanation. And it was not something they had plucked out of thin air to justify a perplexing result; the idea of parallel worlds had long been at least one conceptual underpinning of quantum theory. And so Galiana had tried to do something similar
