I shook my head, not because I didn’t understand what she meant, but because I knew I could have no proper grasp of the emotional pain that severance must have caused. I doubted that pain was a strong enough word for the psychic shock associated with being ripped away from her fellows. Nothing in ordinary human experience could approximate the trauma of that separation, any more than a frog could grasp the loss of a loved one. Conjoiners spent their whole lives in a state of gestalt consciousness, sharing thoughts and experiences via a web of implant-mediated neural connections. They had individual personalities, but those personalities were more like the blurred identities of atoms in a metallic solid. Beyond the level of individual self was the state of higher mental union that they called Transenlightenment, analogous to the fizzing sea of dissociated electrons in that same metallic lattice.
And the girl had been ripped away from that, forced to come to terms with existence as a solitary mind, an island once more.
“I understand how bad it must have been,” I said. “But now you can go back. Isn’t that something worth looking forward to?”
“You only think you understand. To a Conjoiner, what happened to me is the worst thing in the world. And now I can’t go back: not now, not ever. I’ve become damaged, broken, useless. My mind is permanently disfigured. It can’t be allowed to return to Transenlightenment.”
“Why ever not? Wouldn’t they be glad to get you back?”
She took a long time answering. In the quiet, I studied her face, watchful for anything that would betray the danger Van Ness clearly believed she posed. Now his fears seemed groundless. She looked smaller and more delicately boned than when we’d first glimpsed her on the Cockatrice. The strangeness of her, the odd shape of her hairless crested skull, should have been off-putting. In truth I found her fascinating. It was not her alienness that drew my furtive attention, but her very human face: her small and pointed chin, the pale freckles under her eyes, the way her mouth never quite closed, even when she was silent. The olive green of her eyes was a shade so dark that from certain angles it became a lustrous black, like the surface of coal.
“No,” she said, answering me finally. “It wouldn’t work. I’d upset the purity of the others, spoil the harmony of the neural connections, like a single out-of-tune instrument in an orchestra. I’d make everyone else start playing out of key.”
“I think you’re being too fatalistic. Shouldn’t we at least try to find some other Conjoiners and see what they say?”
“That isn’t how it works,” she said. “They’d have to take me back, yes, if I presented myself to them. They’d do it out of kindness and compassion. But I’d still end up harming them. It’s my duty not to allow that to happen.”
“Then you’re saying you have to spend the rest of your life away from other Conjoiners, wandering the universe like some miserable excommunicated pilgrim?”
“There are more of us than you realise.”
“You do a good job keeping out of the limelight. Most people only see Conjoiners in groups, all dressed in black like a flock of crows.”
“Maybe you aren’t looking in the right places.”
I sighed, aware that nothing I said was going to convince her that she would be better off returning to her people. “It’s your life, your destiny. At least you’re alive. Our word still holds: we’ll drop you at the nearest safe planet, when we next make orbitfall. If that isn’t satisfactory to you, you’d be welcome to remain aboard ship until we arrive somewhere else.”
“Your captain would allow that? I thought he was the one who wanted to leave the wreck before you’d found me.”
“I’ll square things with the captain. He isn’t the biggest fan of Conjoiners, but he’ll see sense when he realises you aren’t a monster.”
“Does he have a reason not to like me?”
“He’s an old man,” I said simply.
“Riven with prejudice, you mean?”
“In his way,” I said, shrugging. “But don’t blame him for that. He lived through the bad years, when your people were first coming into existence. I think he had some firsthand experience of the trouble that followed.”
“Then I envy him those first-hand memories. Not many of us are still alive from those times. To have lived through those years, to have breathed the same air as Remontoire and the others…” She looked away sadly. “Remontoire’s gone now. So are Galiana and Nevil. We don’t know what happened to any of them.”
I knew she must have been talking about pivotal figures from earlier Conjoiner history, but the people of whom she spoke meant nothing to me. To her, cast so far downstream from those early events on Mars, the names must have held something of the resonance of saints or apostles. I thought I knew something of Conjoiners, but they had a long and complicated internal history of which I was totally ignorant.
“I wish things hadn’t happened the way they did,” I said. “But that was then and this is now. We don’t hate or fear you. If we did, we wouldn’t have risked our necks getting you out of the Cockatrice.”
“No, you don’t hate or fear me,” she replied. “But you still think I might be useful to you, don’t you?”
“Only if you wish to help us.”
“Captain Voulage thought that I might have the expertise to improve the performance of his ship.”
“Did you?” I asked innocently.
“By increments, yes. He showed me the engines and…encouraged me to make certain changes. You told me you are a shipmaster, so you doubtless have some familiarity with the principles involved.”
I thought back to the adjustments I had made to our own engines, when we still had ambitions of fleeing the pirates. The memory of my trembling hand on those three critical dials felt as if it had been dredged from deepest antiquity, rather than something that had happened only days earlier.
“When you say ‘encouraged’…” I began.
“He found ways to coerce me. It is true that Conjoiners can control their perception of pain by applying neural blockades. But only to a degree, and then only when the pain has a real physical origin. If the pain is generated in the head, using a reverse-field trawl, our defences are useless.” She looked at me with a sudden hard intensity, as if daring me to imagine one-tenth of what she had experienced. “It is like locking a door when the wolf is already in the house.”
“I’m sorry. You must have been through hell.”
“I only had the pain to endure,” she said. “I’m not the one anyone needs to feel sorry about.”
The remark puzzled me, but I let it lie. “I have to get back to our own engines now,” I said, “but I’ll come to see you later. In the meantime, I think you should rest.” I snapped a duplicate communications bracelet from my wrist and placed it near her hand, where she could reach it. “If you need me, you can call into this. It’ll take me a little while to get back here, but I’ll come as quickly as possible.”
She lifted her forearm as far as it would go, until the restraints stiffened. “And these?”
“I’ll talk to Van Ness. Now that you’re lucid, now that you’re talking to us, I don’t see any further need for them.”
“Thank you,” she said again. “Inigo. Is that all there is to your name? It’s rather a short one, even by the standards of the retarded.”
“Inigo Standish, shipmaster. And you still haven’t told me your name.”
“I told you: it’s nothing you could understand. We have our own names now, terms of address that can only be communicated in the Transenlightenment. My name is a flow of experiential symbols, a string of interiorised qualia, an expression of a particular dynamic state that has only ever happened under a conjunction of rare physical conditions in the atmosphere of a particular kind of gas giant planet. I chose it myself. It’s considered very beautiful and a little melancholy, like a haiku in five dimensions.”