Felka snorted. She floated in the middle of the chamber, a bloated planet attended by many delicate wooden moons. She wore baggy brown work clothes. At least a dozen partially worked objects were guyed to her waist by nylon filaments. Other lines were hooked into woodworking tools, which ranged from broaches and files to lasers and tiny tethered burrowing robots.
“I imagine she expected to die,” Clavain said. “Or at the very least to be assimilated.”
“You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.”
“It does give one pause for thought.”
Felka sighed, as if they had been over this a dozen times already. “How long have we known each other, Clavain?”
“Longer than most people, I suppose.”
“Yes. And for most of that time you were a soldier. Not always fighting, I’ll grant you that. But you were always a soldier a heart.” Still with one eye on him, she hauled in one of her creations and peered through its latticed wooden interstices. “It strikes me that it might be a little late in the day for moral qualms, don’t you agree?”
“You’re probably right.”
Felka bit her lower lip and, using a thicker line, propelled herself towards one wall of the chamber. Her entourage of wooden creations and tools clattered against each other as she moved. She set about making tea for Clavain.
“You didn’t need to touch my face when I came in,” Clavain remarked. “Should I take that as a good sign?”
“In what way?”
“It occurred to me that you might be getting better at discriminating faces.”
“I’m not. Didn’t you notice the wall of faces on your way in?”
“You must have done that recently,” Clavain said.
“When someone comes in here that I’m not sure about, I touch their face, mapping its contours with my fingers. Then I compare what I’ve mapped with the faces I’ve carved in the wall until I find a match. Then I read off the name. Of course, I have to add new faces now and then, and some need less detail than others . . .”
“But me . . . ?”
“You have a beard, Clavain, and a great many lines. You have thin white hair. I could hardly fail to recognise you, could I? You’re not like any of the others.”
She passed him his bulb. He squeezed a stream of scalding tea into his throat. “I don’t suppose there’s much point denying it.”
He looked at her with as much detachment as he could muster, comparing the way she was now with his memory of her before he had left on Nightshade. It was only a matter of weeks, but in his estimation Felka had become more withdrawn, less a part of the world than at any time in recent memory. She spoke of visitors, but he had the strong suspicion that there had not been very many.
“Clavain?”
“Promise me something, Felka.” He waited until she had turned to look at him. Her black hair, which she wore as long as Galiana had, was matted and greasy. Nodes of sleep dust nestled in the corners of her eyes. Her eyes were pale green, almost jade, the irises jarring against bloodshot pale pink. The skin beneath them was swollen and faintly blue, as if bruised. Like Clavain, Felka had a need for sleep that marked her as unusual amongst the Conjoined.
“Promise you what, Clavain?”
“If—when—it gets too bad, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”
“What good would it do?”
“You know I’d always try to do my best for you, don’t you? Especially now that Galiana isn’t here for us.”
Her raw-rubbed eyes studied him. “You always did your best, Clavain. But you can’t help what I am. You can’t work miracles.”
He nodded sadly. It was true, but knowing it hardly helped.
Felka was not like the other Conjoiners. He had met her for the first time during his second trip to Galiana’s nest on Mars. The product of an aborted experiment in foetal brain manipulation, she had been a tiny damaged child, not merely unable to recognise faces, but unable to interact with other people at all. Her entire world revolved around a single endlessly absorbing game. Galiana’s nest had been encircled by a giant structure known as the Great Wall of Mars. The Wall was a failed terraforming project that had been damaged in an earlier war. Yet it had never collapsed, for Felka’s game involved coaxing the Wall’s self-repair mechanisms into activity, an endless, intricate process of identifying flaws and allocating precious repair resources. The two-hundred-kilometre-high Wall was at least as complex as a human body, and it was as if Felka controlled every single aspect of its healing mechanisms, from the tiniest cell upwards. Felka turned out to be much better at holding the Wall together than a mere machine. Though her mind was damaged to the point where she could not relate to people at all, she had an astonishing ability for complex tasks.
When the Wall had collapsed in the final assault by Clavain’s old comrades, the Coalition for Neural Purity, Galiana, Felka and he had made a last-ditch escape from the nest. Galiana had tried to dissuade him from taking Felka, warning him that without the Wall she would experience a state of deprivation far crueller than death itself. But Clavain had taken her anyway, convinced that there had to be some hope for the girl; that there had to be something else her mind could latch on to as a surrogate for the Wall.
He had been right, but it had taken many years to prove the point.
Through the years that followed—four hundred of them, although neither of them had experienced more than a century of subjective time—Felka had been coaxed and guided towards her current fragile state of mind. Subtle and delicate neural manipulation gave her back some of the brain functions that had been destroyed in the foetal intervention: language, and a growing sense that other people were more than mere automata. There were setbacks and failures—she had never learned to distinguish faces, for instance—but the triumphs outweighed them. Felka found other things to snare her mind, and during the long interstellar expedition she was happier than she had ever been. Every new world offered the prospect of a shatteringly difficult puzzle.
Eventually, however, she had decided to return home. There had been no rancour between her and Galiana, merely a sense that it was time to begin collating the knowledge that she had helped gather so far, and that the best place to do so was the Mother Nest, with its vast analytic resources.
But she returned to find the Mother Nest embroiled in war. Clavain was soon off fighting the Demarchists, and Felka found that interpreting the data from the expedition was no longer viewed as a high-priority task.
Slowly, so slowly that it was barely evident from year to year, Clavain had watched her retreat back into her own private world. She had begun to play a less and less active role in Mother Nest affairs, isolating her mind from the other Conjoiners except on rare occasions. Things had only worsened when Galiana had come back, neither dead nor alive, but in some horrible intermediate state.
The wooden toys Felka surrounded herself with were symptoms of a desperate need to engage her mind with a problem worthy of her cognitive abilities. But for all that they held her interest, they were doomed to fail in the long run. Clavain had seen it happen already. He knew that what Felka needed was beyond his powers to give.
“Perhaps when the war’s over . . .” he said lamely. “If starflight becomes routine once more, and we start exploring again . . .”
“Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil, Clavain.”
Felka took her own drinking bulb and cast off into the midst of her chamber. Absently, she began to chisel away at one of her solid compositions. The thing she was working on looked like a cube made from smaller cubes, with square gaps in some of the faces. She poked the chisel into one of these gaps and rasped back and forth, barely looking at the thing.
“I’m not promising anything,” he said. “I’m just saying I’ll do what I can.”
“The jugglers might not even be able to help me.”
“Well, we won’t know until we try, will we?”
“I suppose not.”
“That’s the spirit,” Clavain said.
Something clunked inside the object she was working on. Felka hissed like a scalded cat and flung the ruined contraption at the nearest wall. It shattered into a hundred blocky pieces. Almost without hesitation she hauled in another piece and began working on that instead.
“And if the Pattern Jugglers don’t help, we could try the Shrouders.”
Clavain smiled. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If the Jugglers don’t work, then we can think about other possibilities. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. There’s the small matter of winning a war first.”
“But they say it will soon be over.”
“They do, don’t they?”
Felka slipped with the tool she was using and gouged a little flap of skin from the side of her finger. She pressed the finger against her mouth and sucked on it hard, like someone working the last drop of juice from a lemon. “What makes you think otherwise?”