And she had. The Conjoiners had launched three ships, moving slightly slower than the speed of light, on an expedition into deep interstellar space. The expedition would take at least a century and a half; equally eager for new experience, Clavain and Felka had journeyed with her. All had progressed according to plan: Galiana and her allies visited many solar systems, and while they never found any unambiguous signs of active intelligence, they nonetheless catalogued many remarkable phenomena, as well as uncovering further ruins. Then came reports, already outdated, of a crisis back home: growing tensions between the Conjoiners and their moderate allies, the Demarchists. Clavain needed to return home to lend his tactical support to the remaining Conjoiners.
Galiana had considered it more important to continue with the expedition; their amicable separation in deep space left one of the ships returning home, carrying Clavain and Felka, while the two other craft continued to loop further into the plane of the galaxy.
They had intended to be reunited, but when Galiana’s ship finally returned to the Conjoiner Mother Nest, it did so on automatic pilot, damaged and dead. Somewhere out in space a parasitic entity had attacked both of the ships, destroying one. Immediately afterwards, black machines had clawed into the hull of Galiana’s ship, systematically anatomising her crew. One by one, they had all been killed, until only Galiana remained. The black machines had infiltrated her skull, squeezing into the interstices of her brain. Horribly, she was still alive, but utterly incapable of independent action. She had become the parasite’s living puppet.
With Clavain’s permission the Conjoiners had frozen her against the day when they might be able to remove the parasite safely. One day they might even have succeeded, but then a rift had opened in Conjoiner affairs: the beginning of the same crisis that had eventually brought Clavain to the Resurgam system and, latterly, to Ararat. In the conflict Galiana’s frozen body had been destroyed.
Clavain’s grief had been a vast, soul-sucking thing. It would have killed him, Scorpio thought, had not his people been in such desperate need of leadership. Saving the colony on Resurgam had given him something to focus on besides the loss he had suffered. It had kept him somewhere this side of sanity.
And, later, there had been a kind of consolation.
Galiana had not led them to Ararat, yet it turned out that Ararat was one of the worlds she had visited after her separation from Clavain and Felka. The planet had attracted her because of the alien organisms filling its ocean. It was a Juggler world, and that was vitally important, for few things that visited Juggler worlds were ever truly forgotten.
Pattern Jugglers had been encountered on many worlds that conformed to the same aquatic template as Ararat. After years of study, there was still no agreement as to whether or not the aliens were intelligent in their own right. But all the same it was clear that they prized intelligence themselves, preserving it with the loving devotion of curators.
Now and then, when a person swam in the seas of a Juggler planet, the microscopic organisms entered the swimmer’s nervous system. It was a kinder process than the neural invasion that had taken place aboard Galiana’s ship. The Juggler organisms only wanted to record, and when they had unravelled the swimmer’s neural patterns they would retreat. The mind of the swimmer would have been captured by the sea, but the swimmer was almost always free to return to land. Usually, they felt no change at all. Rarely, they would turn out to have been given a subtle gift, a tweak to their neurological architecture that permitted superhuman cognition or insight. Mostly it lasted for only a few hours, but very infrequently it appeared permanent.
There was no way to tell if Galiana had gained any gifts after she had swum in the ocean of this world, but her mind had certainly been captured. It was there now, frozen beneath the waves, waiting to be imprinted on the consciousness of another swimmer.
Clavain had guessed this, but he had not been the first to attempt communion with Galiana. That honour had fallen to Felka. For twenty years she had swum, immersed in the memories and glacial consciousness of her mother. In all that time Clavain had held back from swimming himself, fearing perhaps that when he encountered the imprint of Galiana he would find it in some sense wrong, untrue to his memory of what she had been. His doubts had ebbed over the years, but he had still never made the final commitment of swimming. Nonetheless, Felka—who had always craved the complexity of experience that the ocean offered—had swum regularly, and she had reported back her experiences to Clavain. Through his daughter he had again achieved some connection with Galiana, and for the time being, until he summoned the courage to swim himself, that had been enough.
But two years ago the sea had taken Felka, and she had not returned.
Scorpio thought about that now, choosing his next words with great care. “Nevil, I understand this is difficult for you, but you must also understand that this thing, whatever it is, could be a very serious matter for the settlement.”
“I get that, Scorp.”
“But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?”
“I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters.”
“Maybe we don’t. Me, I don’t really care about the bigger picture. It’s never been my strong point.”
“Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have.”
“So you think there are millions—billions—of people out there who are going to die? People we’ve never met, people we’ve never come within a light-year of in our lives?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well, sorry, but that isn’t the way my head works. I just can’t process that kind of threat. I don’t do mass extinction. I’m a lot more locally focused than that. And right now I have a local problem.”
“You think so?”
“I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That’s a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping.”
“But you didn’t actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?” Clavain did not wait for Scorpio’s answer. “And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a reentry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?”
“I don’t know,” Scorpio said. He couldn’t tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. “But whatever it is must have come down recently. It’s not like any of die other artefacts we’ve pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren’t so thick. This thing didn’t look as though it had been under for more than a few days.”
Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease.
They were returning to the tent.
“I watch the skies a lot, Scorp,” Clavain said. “At night, when there aren’t any clouds. Lately I’ve been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain’s just been pulled back for an instant. I’m guessing you think that makes me mad, don’t you?”
Scorpio didn’t know what he thought. “Alone out here, anyone would see things,” he said.
“But it wasn’t cloudy last night,” Clavain said, “or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn’t see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us.”