Galactic North

  “Forget it,” Clavain said, turning away from his victim.

  And then he moved deeper into the nest, to see who else he could kill before the odds took him.

  But the odds never did.

  “You were always were lucky,” Galiana said, leaning over him. They were somewhere underground again— deep in the nest. A medical area, by the look of things. He was on a bed, fully clothed apart from the outer layer of chameleoflage armour. The room was grey and kettle-shaped, ringed by a circular balcony.

  “What happened?”

  “You took a head wound, but you’ll survive.”

  He groped for the right question. “What about Warren’s attack?”

  “We endured three waves. We took casualties, of course.”

  Around the circumference of the balcony were thirty or so grey couches, slightly recessed into archways studded with grey medical equipment. They were all occupied. There were more Conjoiners in this room than he had seen so far in one place. Some of them looked very close to death.

  Clavain reached up and examined his head, gingerly. There was some dried blood on the scalp, matted with his hair, some numbness, but it could have been a lot worse. He felt normal—no memory drop-outs or aphasia. When he pushed himself up to sitting and tried to stand, his body obeyed his will with only a tinge of dizziness.

  “Warren won’t stop at just three waves, Galiana.”

  “I know.” She paused. “We know there’ll be more.”

  He walked to the railing on the inner side of the balcony and looked over the edge. He had expected to see something—some chunk of incomprehensible surgical equipment, perhaps—but the middle of the room was only an empty, smooth-walled, grey pit. He shivered. The air was colder than in any part of the nest he had visited so far, with a medicinal tang that reminded him of the convalescence ward on Deimos. What made him shiver even more was the realisation that some of the injured—some of the dead—were barely older than the children he had visited only hours ago. Perhaps some of them were those children, conscripted from the nursery since his visit, uploaded with fighting reflexes through their new implants.

  “What are you going to do? You know you can’t win. Warren lost only a tiny fraction of his available force in those waves. You look as if you’ve lost half your nest.”

  “It’s much worse than that,” Galiana said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not quite ready yet. But I can show you in a moment. ”

  He felt colder than ever now. “What do you mean, ‘not quite ready’?”

  Galiana looked deeply into his eyes now. “You suffered a serious head injury, Clavain. The entry wound was small, but the internal bleeding . . . it would have killed you, had we not intervened.” Before he could ask the inevitable question she answered it for him. “We injected a small cluster of medichines into your head. They undid the damage very easily. But it seemed provident to allow them to grow.”

  “You’ve put replicators in my head?”

  “You needn’t sound so horrified. They’re already growing—spreading out and interfacing with your existing neural circuitry—but the total volume of glial mass they will consume is tiny: only a few cubic millimetres in total, across your entire brain.”

  He wondered if she was calling his bluff. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “You won’t—not for a minute or so.” Now she pointed into the empty pit in the middle of the room. “Stand here and look into the air.”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  But as soon as he had spoken, he knew he was wrong. There was something in the pit. He blinked and directed his attention somewhere else, but when he returned his gaze to the pit, the thing he imagined he had seen—milky, spectral—was still there, and becoming sharper and brighter by the second. It was a three-dimensional structure, as complex as an exercise in protein-folding. A tangle of loops and connecting branches and nodes and tunnels, embedded in a ghostly red matrix.

  Suddenly he saw it for what it was: a map of the nest, dug into Mars. Just as the Coalition had suspected, the base was far more extensive than the original structure, reaching deeper and further out than anyone had imagined. Clavain made a mental effort to retain some of what he was seeing in his mind, the intelligence-gathering reflex stronger than the conscious knowledge that he would never see Deimos again.

  “The medichines in your brain have interfaced with your visual cortex,” Galiana said. “That’s the first step on the road to Transenlightenment. Now you’re privy to the machine-generated imagery encoded by the fields through which we move—most of it, anyway.”

  “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 prevent 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 that would identify the room in which he stood. There: twenty-odd bright lights, accompanied by one much fainter than the rest. 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 coalesced towards 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—as beautiful and alluring as anything Clavain had ever imagined—was extending a ray towards the isolated node that 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.

  Afterwards, 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 amongst them. But if he could not convey the core of the experience, he could at least s
kirt 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 feel 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, lacking 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 grey 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 towards 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 grey 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 her actions, 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 previous visit. The room was still austere to the point of oppressive-ness. Felka looked the same. In every respect it was as if only an instant had passed since their first meeting; as if the onset of war and the assaults against the nest—the battle in 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 the task awed Clavain.

  Before, he had watched her make strange gestures in the empty air in front of her. Now the machines in his head revealed the purpose 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 etching 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 colour, and Felka was responding to these alterations with what he now saw was frightening efficiency. It was as if the colour changes warned of some malignancy in part of the Wall, and by touching it—expressing some tactile code—Felka was able to restructure the etching to block and neutralise the malignancy before it spread.

  “I don’t understand,” Clavain said. “I thought we destroyed the Wall, completely killed its systems.”

  “You only ever injured it,” Galiana said, “stopped it from growing, and from managing its own repair processes correctly . . . but you never truly killed it.”

  Sandra Voi had guessed, Clavain realised. 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 stabilised 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. If Felka recognised kinship with it . . . what would that make her?”

  “Someone lonely, that’s all.” Clavain watched the girl’s motions. “She seems faster than before. Is that possible?”

  “I told you things had deteriorated. She’s having to work harder to hold the Wall together.”

  “Warren must have attacked it.” Clavain said. “The possibility of knocking down the Wall always figured in our contingency plans for another war. I just never thought it would happen so soon.” Then he looked at Felka. Maybe it was his imagination, but she seemed to be working even faster than when he had entered the room, not just since his last visit. “How long do you think she can keep it together? ”

  “Not much longer,” Galiana said. “As a matter of fact, I think she’s already failing.”

  It was true. Now that he looked closely at the ghost Wall, he saw that the upper edge was not the mathematically smooth ring it should have been: there were scores of tiny ragged bites eating down from the top. Felka’s activities were increasingly directed to these opening cracks, instructing the crippled structure to divert energy and raw materials to these critical failure points. Clavain knew that the distant processes Felka directed were awesome. Within the Wall lay a lymphatic system whose peristaltic feed-pipes ranged in size from metres across to the submicroscopic, all flowing with myriad tiny repair machines. Felka chose where to send those machines, her hand gestures establishing pathways between damage points and the factories sunk into the Wall’s ramparts that made the required types of machine. For more than a decade, Galiana said, Felka had kept the Wall from crumbling—but for most of that time her adversaries had been only natural decay and accidental damage. It was a different game now that the Wall had been attacked again. It was not one she could ever win.

  Felka’s movements became swifter, less fluid. Her face remained impassive, but in the quickening way that her eyes darted from point to point it was possible to read the first hints of panic. No surprise, either: the deepest cracks in the structure now reached a quarter of the way to the surface, and they were too wide to be repaired. The Wall was unzipping along those flaws. Cubic kilometres of atmosphere would be howling out through the openings. The loss of pressure would be immeasurably slow at first, for near the top the trapped cylinder of atmosphere was only fractionally thicker than the rest of the Martian atmosphere. But only at first . . .

  “We have to get deeper,” Clavain said. “Once the Wall goes, we won’t have a chance in hell if we’re anywhere near the surface. It’ll be like the worst tornado in history.”

  “What will your brother do? Will he nuke us?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He’ll want to get hold of any technologies you’ve hidden away. He’ll wait until the dust storms have died down, then he’ll raid the nest with a hundred times as many troops as you’ve seen so far. You won’t be able to resist, Galiana. If you’re lucky y
ou may just survive long enough to be taken prisoner.”

  “There won’t be any prisoners,” Galiana said.

  “You’re planning to die fighting?”

  “No. And mass suicide doesn’t figure in our plans either. Neither will be necessary. By the time your brother reaches here, there won’t be anyone left in the nest.”

  Clavain thought of the worms encircling the area; how small the chances were of reaching any kind of safety if it involved getting past them. “Secret tunnels under the worm zone, is that it? I hope you’re serious.”

  “I’m deadly serious,” Galiana said. “And yes, there is a secret tunnel. The other children have already gone through it now. But it doesn’t lead under the worm zone.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Somewhere a lot further away.”

  When they passed through the medical centre again it was empty, save for a few swan-necked robots patiently waiting for further casualties. They had left Felka behind tending the Wall, her hands a manic blur as she tried to slow the rate of collapse. Clavain had tried to make her come with them, but Galiana had told him he was wasting his time: that she would sooner die than be parted from the Wall.

  “You don’t understand,” Galiana said. “You’re placing too much humanity behind her eyes. Keeping the Wall alive is the single most important fact of her universe— more important than love, pain, death—anything you or I would consider definitively human.”

  “Then what happens to her when the Wall dies?”

  “Her life ends,” Galiana said.

  Reluctantly he had left without her, the taste of shame bitter in his mouth. Rationally it made sense: without Felka’s help, the Wall would collapse much sooner and there was a good chance all their lives would end, not just that of the haunted girl. How deep would they have to go before they were safe from the suction of the escaping atmosphere? Would any part of the nest be safe?