But there were rewards, too.
Iverson, it turned out, was fascinated by Felka, and Felka herself seemed pleasantly amused by the newcomer. It was, perhaps, not all that surprising: Galiana and the others had been busy helping Felka grow the neural circuitry necessary for normal human interactions, adding new layers to supplant the functional regions that had never worked properly — but in all that time, they had never introduced her to another human being she had not already met. And here was Iverson: not just a new voice but a new smell; a new face; a new way of walking — a deluge of new input for her starved mental routines. Clavain watched the way Felka latched on to Iverson when he entered a room, her attention snapping to him, her delight evident. And Iverson seemed perfectly happy to play the games that so wearied the others, the kinds of intricate challenge Felka adored. For hours on end Clavain watched the two of them lost in concentration; Iverson pulling mock faces of sorrow or — on the rare occasions when he beat her — extravagant joy. Felka responded in kind, her face more animated — more plausibly human — than Clavain had ever believed possible. She spoke more often in Iverson’s presence than she had ever done in his, and the utterances she made more closely approximated well-formed, grammatically sound sentences than the disjointed shards of language Clavain had grown to recognise. It was like watching a difficult, backward child suddenly come alight in the presence of a skilled teacher. Clavain thought back to the time when he had rescued Felka from Mars, and how unlikely it had seemed then that she would ever grow into something resembling a normal adult human, as sensitised to others’ feelings as she was to her own. Now, he could almost believe it would happen — yet half the distance she had come had been due to Iverson’s influence, rather than his own.
Afterwards, when even Iverson had wearied of Felka’s ceaseless demands for games, Clavain spoke to him quietly, away from the others.
‘You’re good with her, aren’t you?’
Iverson shrugged, as if the matter was of no great consequence to him. ‘Yeah. I like her. We both enjoy the same kinds of game. If there’s a problem—’
He must have detected Clavain’s irritation. ‘No — no problem at all.’ Clavain put a hand on his shoulder. ‘There’s more to it than just games, though, you have to admit—’
‘She’s a pretty fascinating case, Nevil.’
‘I don’t disagree. We value her highly.’ He flinched, aware of how much the remark sounded like one of Galiana’s typically flat statements. ‘But I’m puzzled. You’ve been revived after nearly a century asleep. We’ve travelled here on a ship that couldn’t even have been considered a distant possibility in your own era. We’ve undergone massive social and technical upheavals in the last hundred years. There are things about us — things about me — I haven’t told you yet. Things about you I haven’t even told you yet.’
‘I’m just taking things one step at a time, that’s all.’ Iverson shrugged and looked distantly past Clavain, through the window behind him. His gaze must have been skating across kilometres of ice towards Diadem’s white horizon, unable to find a purchase. ‘I admit, I’m not really interested in technological innovations. I’m sure your ship’s really nice, but… it’s just applied physics. Just engineering. There may be some new quantum principles underlying your propulsion system, but if that’s the case, it’s probably just an elaborate curlicue on something that was already pretty baroque to begin with. You haven’t smashed the light barrier, have you?’ He read Clavain’s expression accurately. ‘No — didn’t think so. Maybe if you had—’
‘So what exactly does interest you?’
Iverson seemed to hesitate before answering, but when he did speak Clavain had no doubt that he was telling the truth. There was a sudden, missionary fervour in his voice. ‘Emergence. Specifically, the emergence of complex, almost unpredictable patterns from systems governed by a few simple laws. Consciousness is an excellent example. A human mind’s really just a web of simple neuronal cells wired together in a particular way. The laws governing the functioning of those individual cells aren’t all that difficult to grasp — a cascade of well-studied electrical, chemical and enzymic processes. The tricky part is the wiring diagram. It certainly isn’t encoded in DNA in any but the crudest sense. Otherwise why would a baby bother growing neural connections that are pruned down before birth? That’d be a real waste — if you had a perfect blueprint for the conscious mind, you’d only bother forming the connections you needed. No; the mind organises itself during growth, and that’s why it needs so many more neurons than it’ll eventually incorporate into functioning networks. It needs the raw material to work with as it gropes its way toward a functioning consciousness. The pattern emerges, bootstrapping itself into existence, and the pathways that aren’t used — or aren’t as efficient as others — are discarded.’ Iverson paused. ‘But how this organisation happens really isn’t understood in any depth. Do you know how many neurons it takes to control the first part of a lobster’s gut, Nevil? Have a guess, to the nearest hundred.’
Clavain shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Five hundred? A thousand?’
‘No. Six. Not six hundred, just six. Six damned neurons. You can’t get much simpler than that. But it took decades to understand how those six worked together, let alone how that particular network evolved. The problems aren’t inseparable, either. You can’t really hope to understand how ten billion neurons organise themselves into a functioning whole unless you understand how the whole actually functions. Oh, we’ve made some progress — we can tell you exactly which spinal neurons fire to make a lamprey swim, and how that firing pattern maps into muscle motion — but we’re a long way from understanding how something as elusive as the concept of “I” emerges in the developing human mind. Well, at least we were before I went under. You may be about to reveal that you’ve achieved stunning progress in the last century, but something tells me you were too busy with social upheaval for that.’
Clavain felt an urge to argue — angered by the man’s tone — but suppressed it, willing himself into a state of serene acceptance. ‘You’re probably right. We’ve made progress in the other direction — augmenting the mind as it is — but if we genuinely understood brain development, we wouldn’t have ended up with a failure like Felka.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call her a failure, Nevil.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Of course not.’ Now it was Iverson’s turn to place a hand on Clavain’s shoulder. ‘But you must see now why I find so Felka so fascinating. Her mind is damaged — you told me that yourself, and there’s no need to go into the details — but despite that damage, despite the vast abysses in her head, she’s beginning to self--assemble the kinds of higher-level neural routines we all take for granted. It’s as if the patterns were always there as latent potentials, and it’s only now that they’re beginning to emerge. Isn’t that fascinating? Isn’t it something worthy of study?’
Delicately, Clavain removed the man’s hand from his shoulder. ‘I suppose so. I had hoped, however, that there might be something more to it than study.’
‘I’ve offended you, and I apologise. My choice of phrase was poor. Of course I care for her.’
Clavain felt suddenly awkward, as if he had misjudged a fundamentally decent man. ‘I understand. Look, ignore what I said.’
‘Yeah, of course. It — um — will be all right for me to see her again, won’t it?’
Clavain nodded. ‘I’m sure she’d miss you if you weren’t around.’