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 highgee 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.
[Clavain!] 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. [Where have you been, Clavain?]
Outside. He eyed the tutors carefully.
[Outside? Beyond the Mother Nest?] 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.
[In a spaceship?]
Yes. In a very big spaceship.
[Can I see it?] 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.
[What did you do in the spaceship, Clavain?]
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 approach. I helped someone.
[Whom did you help?]
A lady . . . a woman.
[Why did she need your help?]
Her ship—her spaceship—had got into trouble. She needed some assistance and I just happened to be passing by.
[What was the lady called?]
Bax. Antoinette Bax. I gave her a nudge with a rocket, to stop her falling back into a gas giant.
[Why was she coming out of the gas giant?]
I don’t really know, to tell the truth.
[Why did she have two names, Clavain?]
Because . . . This was going to get very messy, he realised. Look, um, I shouldn’t interrupt you, I really shouldn’t. He felt a palpable relaxation in the tutors’ emotional aura. So—um—who’s going to show me what a good flier they are, then?
It was all the spur that the children needed. A welter of voices crowded his skull, competing for his attention. [Me, Clavain, me!]
He watched them kick off into the void, barely able to contain themselves.
The clearing was a spherical space enclosed on all sides by dense growth. One of the structural spars thrust its way clean through the volume, bulging with residential spaces. The tender whirred closer to the spar and then held station with its impellers while Clavain disembarked. Ladders and vines provided hand- and footholds, allowing him to work his way along the spar until he found the entrance to its hollow interior. There was some sense of vertigo, but it was slight. Part of his mind would probably always quail at the thought of clambering recklessly through what felt like a forest’s elevated canopy, but the years had diminished that nagging primate anxiety to the point where it was barely noticeable.
“Felka . . .” he called ahead. “It’s Clavain.”
There was no immediate answer. He burrowed deeper, descending—or ascending?—headfirst. “Felka . . .”
“Hello, Clavain.” Her voice boomed from the middle distance, echoed and amplified by the spar’s peculiar acoustics.
He followed the voice; he could not feel her thoughts. Felka did not participate routinely in the Conjoined mind-state, although that had not always been the case. But even if she had, Clavain would have maintained a certain distance. Long ago, by mutual consent, they had elected to exclude themselves from each other’s minds, except at the most trivial level. Anything else would have been an unwanted intimacy.
The shaft ended in a womblike interior space. This was where Felka spent most of her time these days, in her laboratory and atelier. The walls were a beguiling swirl of wooden growth patterns. To Clavain’s eye, the ellipses and knots resembled geodesic contours of highly stressed space-time. Lanterns glowed in sconces, throwing his shadow across the wood in threatening ogre-like shapes. He helped himself along by his fingertips, brushing past ornate wooden contraptions that floated untethered through the spar. Clavain recognised most of the objects well enough, but one or two looked new to him.
He snatched one from the air for closer examination. It rattled in his grasp. It was a human head fashioned from a single helix of wood; through the gaps in the spiral he could see another head inside, and another inside that one. Possibly there were more. He let the object go and seized another. This one was a sphere bristling with sticks, projecting out to various distances from the surface. Clavain adjusted one of the sticks and felt something click and move within the sphere, like the tumbler of a lock.
“I see you’ve been busy, Felka,” he said.
“I gather I wasn’t the only one,” she replied. “I heard reports. Some business about a prisoner?”
Clavain pawed past another barrage of wooden objects and rounded a corner in the spar. He squeezed through a connecting aperture into a small windowless chamber lit only by lanterns. Their light threw pinks and emeralds across the ochre and tan shades of the walls. One wall consisted entirely of numerous wooden faces, carved with mildly exaggerated features. Those on the periphery were barely half-formed, like acid-etched gargoyles. The air was pungent with the resin of worked woods.
“I don’t think the prisoner will amount to much,” Clavain said. “His identity isn’t apparent yet, but he seems to be some kind of pig criminal. We trawled him, retrieved clear and recent memory patterns that show him murdering people. I’ll spare you the details, but he’s creative, I’ll give him that. It’s not true what they say about pigs having no imagination.”
“I never thought it was, Clavain. What about the other matter, the woman I hear you saved?”
“Ah. Funny how word gets around.” Then he recalled that it had been he who had told the children about Antoinette Bax.
“Was she surprised?”