Galactic North

  “Why didn’t you warn us about the worms?”

  “Warn you?” For the first time something like doubt crossed her face, but it was only fleeting. “We assumed you were fully aware of the Ouroborus infestation. Those worms have been dormant—waiting—for years, but they’ve always been there. It was only when I saw how low your approach was that I realised—”

  “That we might not have known?”

  Worms were area-denial devices; autonomous prey-seeking mines. The war had left many pockets of the solar system still riddled with active worms. The machines were intelligent, in a one-dimensional way. Nobody ever admitted to deploying them and it was usually impossible to convince them that the war was over and that they should quietly deactivate.

  “After what happened to you in Phobos,” Galiana said, “I assumed there was nothing you needed to be taught about worms.”

  He never liked thinking about Phobos: the pain was still too deeply engraved. But if it had not been for the injuries he had sustained there he would never have been sent to Deimos to recuperate; would never have been recruited into his brother’s intelligence wing to study the Conjoiners. Out of that phase of deep immersion in everything concerning the enemy had come his peacetime role as negotiator—and now diplomat—on the eve of another war. Everything was circular, ultimately. And now Phobos was central to his thinking because he saw it as a way out of the impasse—maybe the last chance for peace. But it was too soon to put his idea to Galiana. He was not even sure the mission could still continue, after what had happened.

  “We’re safe now, I take it?”

  “Yes; we can repair the damage to the dyke. Mostly, we can ignore their presence.”

  “We should have been warned. Look, I need to talk to my brother.”

  “Warren? Of course. It’s easily arranged.”

  They walked out of the hangar, away from the half-assembled ships. Somewhere deeper in the nest, Clavain knew, was a factory where the components for the ships were made, mined out of Mars or winnowed from the fabric of the nest. The Conjoiners managed to launch one every six weeks or so; had been doing so for six months. Not one of the ships had ever managed to escape the Martian atmosphere before being shot down . . . but sooner or later he would have to ask Galiana why she persisted with this provocative folly.

  Now, though, was not the time—even if, by Warren’s estimate, he only had three days before Galiana’s next provocation.

  The air elsewhere in the nest was thicker and warmer than in the hangar, which meant he could dispense with the mask. Galiana took him down a short, grey-walled, metallic corridor that ended in a circular room containing a console. He recognised the room from the times he had spoken to Galiana from Deimos. Galiana showed him how to use the system, then left him in privacy while he established a connection with Deimos.

  Warren’s face soon appeared on a screen, thick with pixels like an impressionist portrait. Conjoiners were only allowed to send kilobytes a second to other parts of the system. Much of that bandwidth was now being sucked up by this one video link.

  “You’ve heard, I take it,” Clavain said.

  Warren nodded, his face ashen. “We had a pretty good view from orbit, of course. Enough to see that Voi didn’t make it. Poor woman. We were reasonably sure you’d survived, but it’s good to have it confirmed.”

  “Do you want me to abandon the mission?”

  Warren’s hesitation was more than just timelag. “No . . . I thought about it, of course, and high command agrees with me. Voi’s death was tragic—no escaping that. But she was only along as a neutral observer. If Galiana consents for you to stay, I suggest you do so.”

  “But you still say I only have three days?”

  “That’s up to Galiana, isn’t it? Have you learned much?”

  “You must be kidding. I’ve seen shuttles ready for launch, that’s all. I haven’t raised the Phobos proposal yet, either. The timing wasn’t exactly ideal, after what happened to Voi.”

  “Yes. If only we’d known about that Ouroborus infestation. ”

  Clavain leaned closer to the screen. “Yes. Why the hell didn’t we? Galiana assumed that we would, and I don’t blame her for that. We’ve had the nest under constant surveillance for fifteen years. Surely in all that time we’d have seen evidence of the worms?”

  “You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, maybe the worms weren’t always there.”

  Conscious that there could be nothing private about this conversation—but unwilling to drop the thread—Clavain said, “You think the Conjoiners put them there to ambush us?”

  “I’m saying we shouldn’t disregard any possibility, no matter how unpalatable.”

  “Galiana would never do something like that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” She had just stepped back into the room. “And I’m disappointed that you’d even debate the possibility.”

  Clavain terminated the link with Deimos. “Eavesdropping ’s not a very nice habit, you know.”

  “What did you expect me to do?”

  “Show some trust? Or is that too much of a stretch?”

  “I never had to trust you when you were my prisoner,” Galiana said. “That made our relationship infinitely simpler. Our roles were completely defined.”

  “And now? If you distrust me so completely, why did you ever agree to my visit? Plenty of other specialists could have come in my place. You could even have refused any dialogue.”

  “Voi’s people pressured us to allow your visit,” Galiana said. “Just as they pressured your side into delaying hostilities a little longer.”

  “Is that all?”

  She hesitated slightly now. “I . . . knew you.”

  “Knew me? Is that how you sum up a year of imprisonment? What about the thousands of conversations we had; the times when we put aside our differences to talk about something other than the damned war? You kept me sane, Galiana. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s why I’ve risked my life to come here to talk you out of another provocation.”

  “It’s completely different now.”

  “Of course!” He forced himself not to shout. “Of course it’s different. But not fundamentally. We can still build on that bond of trust and find a way out of this crisis.”

  “But does your side really want a way out of it?”

  He did not answer her immediately, wary of what the truth might mean. “I’m not sure. But I’m not sure you do either, or else you wouldn’t keep pushing your luck.” Something snapped inside him and he asked the question he had meant to ask in a million better ways. “Why do you keep doing it, Galiana? Why do you keep launching those ships when you know they’ll be shot down as soon as they leave the nest?”

  Her eyes locked on to his, unflinchingly. “Because we can. Because sooner or later one will succeed.”

  Clavain nodded. It was exactly the sort of thing he had feared she would say.

  She led him through more grey-walled corridors, descending several levels deeper into the nest. Light poured from snaking strips embedded into the walls like arteries. It was possible that the snaking design was decorative, but Clavain thought it much more likely that the strips had simply grown that way, expressing biological algorithms. There was no evidence that the Conjoiners had attempted to enliven their surroundings, to render them in any sense human.

  “It’s a terrible risk you’re running,” Clavain said.

  “And the status quo is intolerable. I’ve every desire to avoid another war, but if it came to one, we’d at least have the chance to break these shackles.”

  “If you didn’t get exterminated first—”

  “We’d avoid that. In any case, fear plays no part in our thinking. You saw the man accept his fate on the dyke, when he understood that your death would harm us more than his own. He altered his state of mind to one of total acceptance.”

  “Fine. That makes it all right, then.”

  Sh
e halted. They were alone in one of the snakingly lit corridors; he had seen no other Conjoiners since the hangar. “It’s not that we regard individual lives as worthless, any more than you would willingly sacrifice a limb. But now that we’re part of something larger—”

  “Transenlightenment, you mean?”

  It was the Conjoiners’ term for the state of neural communion they shared, mediated by the machines swarming in their skulls. Whereas Demarchists used implants to facilitate real-time democracy, Conjoiners used them to share sensory data, memories—even conscious thought itself. That was what had precipitated the war. Back in 2190, half of humanity had been hooked into the system-wide data nets via neural implants. Then the Conjoiner experiments had exceeded some threshold, unleashing a transforming virus into the nets. Implants had begun to change, infecting millions of minds with the templates of Conjoiner thought. Instantly the infected had become the enemy. Earth and the other inner planets had always been more conservative, preferring to access the nets via traditional media.

  Once they saw communities on Mars and in the asteroid belts fall prey to the Conjoiner phenomenon, the Coalition powers hurriedly pooled their resources to prevent it from spreading to their own states. The Demarchists, out around the gas giants, had managed to get firewalls up before many of their habitats were lost. They had chosen neutrality while the Coalition tried to contain—some said sterilise—zones of Conjoiner takeover. Within three years—after some of the bloodiest battles in human experience—the Conjoiners had been pushed back to a clutch of hideaways dotted around the system. Yet all along they professed a kind of puzzled bemusement that their spread was being resisted. After all, no one who had been assimilated seemed to regret it. Quite the contrary. The few prisoners whom the Conjoiners had reluctantly returned to their pre-infection state had sought every means to re-enter the fold. Some had even chosen suicide rather than be denied Transenlightenment. Like acolytes given a vision of heaven, they devoted their entire waking existence to the search for another glimpse.

  “Transenlightenment blurs our sense of self,” Galiana said. “When the man elected to die, the sacrifice was not absolute for him. He understood that much of what he was had already achieved preservation amongst the rest of us.”

  “But he was just one man. What about the hundred lives you’ve thrown away with your escape attempts? We know—we’ve counted the bodies.”

  “Replacements can always be cloned.”

  Clavain hoped that he hid his disgust satisfactorily. Amongst his people, the very notion of cloning was an unspeakable atrocity, redolent with horror. To Galiana it would be just another technique in her arsenal. “But you don’t clone, do you? And you’re losing people. We thought there would be nine hundred of you in this nest, but that was a gross overestimate, wasn’t it?”

  “You haven’t seen much of it yet,” Galiana said.

  “No, but this place smells deserted. You can’t hide absence, Galiana. I bet there aren’t more than a hundred of you left here.”

  “You’re wrong,” Galiana said. “We have cloning technology, but we’ve hardly ever used it. What would be the point? We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.”

  “Right.” The last thing he needed now was a dose of Conjoiner rhetoric. “So where the hell is everyone?”

  In a while he had part of the answer, if not the whole of it. At the end of the maze of corridors—deep under the Martian surface now—Galiana brought him to a nursery.

  It was shockingly unlike his expectations. Not only did it not match what he had imagined from the vantage point of Deimos, but it jarred against his predictions based on what he had seen so far of the nest. In Deimos, he had assumed a Conjoiner nursery would be a place of grim medical efficiency: all gleaming machines with babies plugged in like peripherals, like a monstrously productive doll factory. Within the nest, he had revised his model to allow for the depleted numbers of Conjoiners. If there was a nursery, it was obviously not very productive. Fewer babies, then— but still a vision of hulking grey machines, bathed in snaking light.

  The nursery was nothing like that.

  The huge room Galiana showed him was almost painfully bright and cheerful: a child’s fantasy of friendly shapes and primary colours. The walls and ceiling projected a holographic sky: infinite blue and billowing clouds of heavenly white. The floor was an undulating mat of synthetic grass forming hillocks and meadows. There were banks of flowers and forests of bonsai trees. There were robot animals: fabulous birds and rabbits just slightly too anthropomorphic to fool Clavain. They were like the animals in children’s books: big-eyed and happy-looking. Toys were scattered on the grass.

  And there were children. They numbered between forty and fifty, spanning by his estimate ages from a few months to six or seven standard years. Some were crawling amongst the rabbits; other, older children were gathered around tree stumps whose sheared-off surfaces flickered rapidly with images, underlighting their faces. They were talking amongst themselves, giggling or singing. He counted perhaps half a dozen adult Conjoiners kneeling with the children. The children’s clothes were a headache of bright, clashing colours and patterns. The Conjoiners crouched amongst them like ravens. Yet the children looked at ease with them, listening attentively when the adults had something to say.

  “This isn’t what you thought it would be like, is it?”

  “No . . . not at all.” There was no point lying to her. “We thought you’d raise your young in a simplified version of the machine-generated environment you experience.”

  “In the early days, that’s more or less what we did.” Subtly, Galiana’s tone of voice had changed. “Do you know why chimpanzees are less intelligent than humans?”

  He blinked at the change of tack. “I don’t know—are their brains smaller?”

  “Yes—but a dolphin’s brain is larger, and they’re scarcely more intelligent than dogs.” Galiana stooped next to a vacant tree stump. Without apparently doing anything, she made a diagram of mammal brain anatomies appear on the trunk’s upper surface, then sketched her finger across the relevant parts. “It’s not overall brain volume that counts so much as the developmental history. The difference in brain volume between a neonatal chimp and an adult is only about twenty per cent. By the time the chimp receives any data from beyond the womb, there’s almost no plasticity left to use. Similarly, dolphins are born with almost their complete repertoire of adult behaviour already hardwired. A human brain, on the other hand, keeps growing through years of learning. We inverted that thinking. If data received during post-natal growth was so crucial to intelligence, perhaps we could boost our intelligence even further by intervening during the earliest phases of brain development.”

  “In the womb?”

  “Yes.” Now she made the tree stump show a human embryo running through cycles of cell division until the faint fold of a rudimentary spinal nerve began to form, nubbed with the tiniest of emergent minds. Droves of subcellular machines swarmed in, invading the nascent nervous system. Then the embryo’s development slammed forward, until Clavain was looking at an unborn human baby.

  “What happened?”

  “It was a grave error,” Galiana said. “Instead of enhancing normal neural development, we impaired it terribly. All we ended up with were various manifestations of savant syndrome.”

  Clavain looked around him. “So you let these kids develop normally?”

  “More or less. There’s no family structure, of course, but then again there are plenty of human and primate societies where the family is less important in child development than the cohort group. So far we haven’t seen any pathologies.”

  Clavain watched as one of the older children was escorted out of the grassy room, through a door in the sky. When the Conjoiner reached the door the child hesitated, tugging against the man’s gentle insistence. The child loo
ked back for a moment, then followed the man through the gap.

  “Where’s that child going?”

  “To the next stage of its development.”

  Clavain wondered what the chances were of him seeing the nursery just as one of the children was being promoted. Small, he judged—unless there was a crash programme to rush as many of them through as quickly as possible. As he thought about this, Galiana took him into another part of the nursery. While this room was smaller and dourer, it was still more colourful than any other part of the nest he had seen before the grassy room. The walls were a mosaic of crowded, intermingling displays, teeming with moving images and rapidly scrolling text. He saw a herd of zebra stampeding through the core of a neutron star. Elsewhere an octopus squirted ink at the face of a twentieth-century despot. Other display facets rose from the floor like Japanese paper screens, flooded with data. Children—up to early teenagers—sat on soft black toadstools next to the screens in little groups, debating.

  A few musical instruments lay around unused: holoclaviers and air-guitars. Some of the children had grey bands around their eyes and were poking their fingers through the interstices of abstract structures, exploring the dragon-infested waters of mathematical space. Clavain could see what they were manipulating on the flat screens: shapes that made his head hurt even in two dimensions.

  “They’re nearly there,” Clavain said. “The machines are outside their heads, but not for long. When does it happen? ”

  “Soon; very soon.”