‘They’re nearly there,’ Clavain said. ‘The machines are outside their heads, but not for long. When does it happen?’
‘Soon; very soon.’
‘You’re rushing them, aren’t you? Trying to get as many children Conjoined as you can. What are you planning?’
‘Something… has arisen, that’s all. The timing of your arrival is either very bad or very fortunate, depending on one’s point of view.’ Before he could query her, Galiana added, ‘Clavain, I want you to meet someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone very precious to us.’
She took him through a series of childproof doors until they reached a small circular room. The walls and ceiling were veined grey; tranquil after the last place. A child sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room. Clavain estimated the girl’s age as ten standard years — perhaps fractionally older. But she did not respond to Clavain’s presence in any way an adult, or even a normal child, would have. She just kept on doing the thing she had been doing when they stepped inside, as if they were not really present at all. It was not particularly clear what she was doing. Her hands moved before her in slow, precise gestures. It was as if she were playing a holoclavier or working a phantom puppet show. Now and then she would pivot around until she was facing another direction and carry on making the hand movements.
‘Her name’s Felka,’ Galiana said.
‘Hello, Felka…’ Clavain waited for a response, but none came. ‘I can see there’s something wrong with her.’
‘She’s one of the savants. Felka developed with machines in her head. She was the last to be born before we realised our failure.’
Something about Felka disturbed him. Perhaps it was the way she carried on regardless, engrossed in an activity to which she appeared to attribute the utmost significance, yet which had to be without any sane purpose.
‘She doesn’t seem aware of us.’
‘Her deficits are severe,’ Galiana said. ‘She has no interest in other human beings. She has prosopagnosia: the inability to distinguish faces. We all look alike to her. Can you imagine something stranger than that?’
He tried, and failed. Life from Felka’s viewpoint must have been a nightmarish thing, surrounded by identical clones whose inner lives she could not begin to grasp. No wonder she was so engrossed in her game.
‘Why is she so precious to you?’ Clavain asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
‘She’s keeping us alive,’ Galiana said.
Of course, he asked Galiana what she meant by that. Galiana’s only response was to tell him that he was not yet ready to be shown the answer.
‘And what exactly would it take for me to reach that stage?’
‘A simple procedure.’
Oh yes, he understood that part well enough. Just a few machines in the right parts of his brain and the truth could be his. Politely, doing his best to mask his distaste, Clavain declined. Fortunately, Galiana did not press the point, for the time had arrived for the meeting he had been promised before his arrival on Mars.
He watched a subset of the nest file into the conference room. Galiana was their leader only inasmuch as she had founded the lab from which the original experiment had sprung and was accorded some respect deriving from seniority. She was also the most obvious spokesperson amongst them. But they all had areas of expertise that could not easily be shared amongst other Conjoined, which distinguished them from the hive mind of identical clones that still figured in the Coalition’s propaganda. If the nest was in any way like an ant colony, then it was an ant colony in which every ant fulfilled a role distinct from all the others. Naturally, no individual could be solely entrusted with a particular skill essential to the nest — that would have been dangerous overspecialisation — but neither had individuality been completely subsumed into the group mind.
The conference room must have dated back to the days when the nest was a research outpost, or even earlier, when it was some kind of mining base in the early 2100s. It was much too big for the dour handful of Conjoiners who stood around the main table. Tactical read-outs around the table showed the build-up of strike forces above the Martian exclusion zone; probable drop trajectories for ground-force deployment.
‘Nevil Clavain,’ Galiana said, introducing him to the others. Everyone sat down. ‘I’m just sorry that Sandra Voi can’t be with us now. We all feel the tragedy of her death. But perhaps out of this terrible event we can find some common ground. Nevil — before you came here you told us you had a proposal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.’
‘I’d really like to hear it,’ one of the others murmured audibly.
Clavain’s throat was dry. Diplomatically, this was quicksand. ‘My proposal concerns Phobos—’
‘Go on,’ Galiana invited.
‘I was injured there,’ he said. ‘Very badly. Our attempt to clean out the worm infestation failed and I lost some good friends. That makes it personal between me and the worms. But I’d accept anyone’s help to finish them off.’
Galiana glanced quickly at her compatriots before answering. ‘A joint assault operation?’
‘It could work.’
‘Yes…’ Galiana looked lost, momentarily. ‘I suppose it could be a way out of the impasse. Our own attempt failed, too — and the Interdiction’s stopped us from trying again.’ Again, she seemed to fall into reverie. ‘But who would really benefit from the flushing out of Phobos? We’d still be quarantined here.’
Clavain leaned forward. ‘A cooperative gesture might be exactly the thing to lead to a relaxation in the terms of the Interdiction. But don’t think of it that way. Think instead of reducing the current threat from the worms.’
‘Threat?’
Clavain nodded. ‘It’s possible that you haven’t noticed.’ He leaned further forward, elbows on the table. ‘We’re concerned about the Phobos worms. They’ve begun altering the moon’s orbit. The shift is tiny at the moment, but too large to be anything other than deliberate.’
Galiana looked away from him for an instant, as if weighing her options, then said, ‘We were aware of this, but you weren’t to know that.’
Was that an indication of gratitude from Galiana?
He had assumed the worms’ activity could not have escaped Galiana. ‘We’ve seen odd behaviour from other worm infestations across the system, things that begin to look like emergent intelligence, but never anything this purposeful. This infestation must have come from a batch with some subroutines we never even guessed existed. Do you have any ideas about what they might be up to?’
Again, there was the briefest of hesitations, as if she was communing with her compatriots for the right response. Then she nodded towards a male Conjoiner sitting opposite her, Clavain guessing that the gesture was entirely for his benefit. His hair was black and curly, his face as smooth and untroubled by expression as Galiana’s, with something of the same beautifully symmetrical bone structure.
‘This is Remontoire,’ said Galiana. ‘He’s our specialist on the Phobos situation.’
Remontoire nodded politely. ‘In answer to your question, we currently have no viable theories as to what they’re doing, but we do know one thing: they’re raising the apocentre of the moon’s orbit.’ Apocentre, Clavain knew, was the Martian equivalent of apogee for an object orbiting Earth: the point of highest altitude in an elliptical orbit. Remontoire continued, his voice as preternaturally calm as a parent reading slowly to a child, ‘The natural orbit of Phobos is actually inside the Roche limit for a gravitationally bound moon; Phobos is raising a tidal bulge on Mars but, because of friction, the bulge can’t quite keep up with Phobos. It’s causing Phobos to spiral slowly closer to Mars, by about two metres a century. In a few tens of millions of years, what’s left of the moon will crash into Mars.’