“Tell me this wasn’t planned, Galiana. Tell me you weren’t intending to put machines in me at the first opportunity.”
“No; I wasn’t planning it. But nor was I going to let your phobias stop me from saving your life.”
The image grew in complexity. Glowing nodes of light appeared in the tunnels, some moving slowly through the network.
“What are they?”
“You’re seeing the locations of the Conjoiners,” Galiana said. “Are there as many as you imagined?”
Clavain judged that there were no more than seventy lights in the whole complex now. He searched for a cluster which would identify the room where he stood. There: twenty-odd bright lights, accompanied by one much fainter. Himself, of course. There were few people near the top of the nest-the attack must have collapsed half the tunnels, or maybe Galiana had deliberately sealed entrances herself.
“Where is everyone? Where are the children?”
“Most of the children are gone now.” She paused. “You were right to guess that we were rushing them to Transenlightenment, Clavain.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only way out of here.”
The image changed again. Now each of the bright lights was connected to another by a shimmering filament. The topology of the network was constantly shifting, like a pattern seen in a kaleidoscope.
Occasionally, too swiftly for Clavain to be sure, it shifted toward a mandala of elusive symmetry, only to dissolve into the flickering chaos of the ever-changing network. He studied Galiana’s node and saw that-even as she was speaking to him-her mind was in constant rapport with the rest of the nest.
Now something very bright appeared in the middle of the image, like a tiny star, against which the shimmering network paled almost to invisibility. “The network is abstracted now,” Galiana said. “The bright light represents its totality: the unity of Transenlightenment. Watch.”
He watched. The bright light-beautiful and alluring as anything Clavain had ever imagined-was extending a ray toward the isolated node which represented himself. The ray was extending itself through the map, coming closer by the second.
“The new structures in your mind are nearing maturity,” Galiana said. “When the ray touches you, you will experience partial integration with the rest of us. Prepare yourself, Nevil.”
Her words were unnecessary. His fingers were already clenched sweating on the railing as the light inched closer and engulfed his node.
“I should hate you for this,” Clavain said.
“Why don’t you? Hate’s always the easier option.”
“Because…” Because it made no difference now. His old life was over. He reached out for Galiana, needing some anchor against what was about to hit him. Galiana squeezed his hand and an instant later he knew something of Transenlightenment. The experience was shocking; not because it was painful or fearful, but because it was profoundly and totally new. He was literally thinking in ways that had not been possible microseconds earlier.
Afterward, when Clavain tried to imagine how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not among them. But if he could not convey the core of the experience, he could at least skirt its essence with metaphor. It was like standing on the shore of an ocean, being engulfed by a wave taller than himself. For a moment he sought the surface; tried to keep the water from his lungs. But there happened not to be a surface. What had consumed him extended infinitely in all directions. He could only submit to it. Yet as the moments slipped by it turned from something terrifying in its unfamiliarity to something he could begin to adapt to; something that even began in the tiniest way to seem comforting. Even then he glimpsed that it was only a shadow of what Galiana was experiencing every instant of her life.
“All right,” Galiana said. “That’s enough for now.”
The fullness of Transenlightenment retreated, like a fading vision of Godhead. What he was left with was purely sensory; no longer any direct rapport with the others. His state of mind came crashing back to normality.
“Are you all right, Nevil?”
“Yes…” His mouth was dry. “Yes; I think so.”
“Look around you.”
He did.
The room had changed completely. So had everyone in it.
His head reeling, Clavain walked in light. The formerly gray walls oozed beguiling patterns; as if a dark forest had suddenly become enchanted. Information hung in veils in the air; icons and diagrams and numbers clustering around the beds of the injured, thinning out into the general space like fantastically delicate neon sculptures. As he walked toward the icons they darted out of his way, mocking him like schools of brilliant fish. Sometimes they seemed to sing, or tickle the back of his nose with half-familiar smells.
“You can perceive things now,” Galiana said. “But none of it will mean much to you. You’d need years of education, or deeper neural machinery for that-building cognitive layers. We read all this almost subliminally.”
Galiana was dressed differently now. He could still see the vague shape of her gray outfit, but layered around it were billowing skeins of light, unravelling at their edges into chains of Boolean logic. Icons danced in her hair like angels. He could see, faintly, the web of thought linking her with the other Conjoiners.
She was inhumanly beautiful.
“You said things were much worse,” Clavain said. “Are you ready to show me now?”
She took him to see Felka again, passing on the way through deserted nursery rooms, populated now only by bewildered mechanical animals. Felka was the only child left in the nursery.
Clavain had been deeply disturbed by Felka when he had seen her before, but not for any reason he could easily express. Something about the purposefulness of what she did; performed with ferocious concentration, as if the fate of creation hung on the outcome of her game. Felka and her surroundings had not changed at all since his visit. The room was still austere to the point of oppressiveness. Felka looked the same. In every respect it was as if only an instant had passed since their meeting; as if the onset of war and the assaults against the nest-the battle of which this was only an interlude-were only figments from someone else’s troubling dream; nothing that need concern Felka in her devotion to the task at hand.
And what the task was awed Clavain.
Before he had watched her make strange gestures in front of her. Now the machines in his head revealed the purpose that those gestures served. Around Felka-cordoning her like a barricade-was a ghostly representation of the Great Wall.
She was doing something to it.
It was not a scale representation, Clavain knew. The Wall looked much higher here in relation to its diameter. And the surface was not the nearly invisible membrane of the real thing, but something like etched glass. The etchwork was a filigree of lines and junctions, descending down to smaller and smaller scales in fractal steps, until the blur of detail was too fine for his eyes to discriminate. It was shifting and altering color, and Felka was responding to these alterations with what he now saw was frightening efficiency. It was as if the color changes warned of some malignancy in part of the Wall, and by touching it-expressing some tactile code-Felka was able to restructure the etchwork to block and neutralize the malignancy before it spread.
“I don’t understand,” Clavain said. “I thought we destroyed the Wall; completely killed its systems.”
“No,” Galiana said. “You only ever injured it. Stopped it from growing, and from managing its own repair- processes correctly…but you never truly killed it.”
Sandra Voi had guessed, Clavain realized. She had wondered how the Wall had survived this long.
Galiana told him the rest-how they had managed to establish control pathways to the Wall from the nest, fifteen years earlier-optical cables sunk deep below the worm zone. “We stabilized the Wall’s degradation with software running on dumb machines,” she said. “But when Felka was born we found that she managed the task just as efficiently as the computers; in some ways better than they ever did. In fact, she seemed to thrive on it. It was as if in the Wall she found…” Galiana trailed off. “I was going to say a friend.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because the Wall’s just a machine. Which means if Felka recognized kinship…what would that make her?”
