As much as she wanted to, she could not quite recall what had happened to the other ship that had continued the search. She felt only a shocking sense of loss, a screaming vacuum inside her head that should have been filled with voices.
‘My crew?’
‘We’ll come to that,’ Skade said again.
‘And Clavain and Felka? Did they make it back, after all? We said goodbye to them in deep space; they were supposed to return to the Mother Nest.’
There was a terrible, terrible pause before Skade answered. ‘They made it back.’
Galiana would have sighed if sighing were possible. The feeling of relief was startling; she had not realised how tense she had been until she learned that her loved ones were safe.
In the calm, blissful moments that followed, Galiana looked more closely at Skade. In certain respects she looked exactly like a Conjoiner from Galiana’s era. She wore a plain outfit of pyjamalike black trousers and loosely cinched black jacket, fashioned from something like silk and devoid of either ornamentation or any indication of allegiance. She was ascetically thin and pale, to the point where she looked on the ravenous edge of starvation. Her facial tone was waxy and smooth — not unattractive, but lacking the lines and creases of habitual expression. And she had no hair on either her scalp or her face, lending her the look of an unfinished doll. So far, at least, she was indistinguishable from thousands of other Conjoiners: without mind-to-mind linkage, and devoid of the usual cloud of projected phantasms that lent them individuality, they could be difficult to tell apart.
But Galiana had never seen a Conjoiner who looked anything like Skade. Skade had a crest — a stiff, narrow structure that began to emerge from her brow an inch above her nose, before curving back along the midline of her scalp. The narrow upper surface of the crest was hard and bony, but the sides were rilled with beautifully fine vertical striations. They shimmered with diffraction patterns: electric blues and sparkling oranges, a cascade of rainbow shades that shifted with the tiniest movement of Skade’s head. There was more to it than that, however: Galiana saw fluidlike waves of different colours pump along the crest even when there was no change in its angle.
She asked, ‘Were you always like that, Skade?’
Skade touched her crest gently. ‘No. This is a Conjoiner augmentation, Galiana. Things have changed since you left us. The best of us think faster than you imagined possible.’
‘The best of you?’
I didn’t mean to put it quite that way. It’s just that some of us have hit the limitations of the basic human bodyplan. The implants in our heads enable us to think ten or fifteen times faster than normal, all the time, but at the cost of increased thermal dissipation requirements. My blood is pumped through my crest, and then into the network of rills, where it throws off heat. The rills are optimised for maximum surface area, and they ripple to circulate air currents. The effect is visually pleasing, I’m told, but that’s entirely accidental. We learned the trick from the dinosaurs, actually. They weren’t as stupid as you’d think.‘ Skade stroked her crest again. ’It shouldn’t alarm you, Galiana. Not everything has changed.‘
‘We heard there’d been a war,’ Galiana said. ‘We were fifteen light-years out when we picked up the reports. First there was the plague, of course… and then the war. The reports didn’t make any sense. They said we were going to war against the Demarchists, our old allies.’
‘The reports were true,’ Skade said, with a trace of regret.
‘In God’s name, why?’
‘It was the plague. It demolished Demarchist society, throwing open a massive power vacuum around Yellowstone. At their request, we moved in to establish an interim government, running Chasm City and its satellite communities. Better us than another faction, was the reasoning. Can you imagine the mess that the Ultras or the Skyjacks would have made? Well, it worked for a few years, but then the Demarchists started regaining some of their old power. They didn’t like the way we’d usurped control of the system, and they weren’t prepared to negotiate a peaceful return to Demarchist control. So we went to war. They started it; everyone agrees about that.’
Galiana felt some of her elation slipping away. She had hoped that the rumours would turn out to be exaggerations. ‘But we won, evidently,’ she said.
‘… No. Not as such. The war’s still happening, you see.’
‘But it’s been…’
‘Fifty-four years.’ Skade nodded. ‘Yes. I know. Of course, there’ve been lapses and lulls, ceasefires and brief interludes of detente. But they haven’t lasted. The old ideological schisms have opened up again, like raw wounds. At heart they’ve never trusted us, and we’ve always regarded them as reactionary Luddites, unwilling to face the next phase of human transcendence.’
Galiana felt, for the first time since waking, an odd migrainous pressure somewhere behind her eyes. With the pressure came a squall of primal emotions, howling up from the oldest part of her mammalian brain. It was the awful fear of being pursued, of sensing a host of dark predators coming closer. Machines, said a memory.
Machines like wolves, which came out of interstellar space and locked on to your exhaust flame.
You called them wolves, Galiana.
Them.
Us.
The odd moment abated.
‘But we worked together so well, for so long,’ Galiana said. ‘Surely we can find common ground again. There are more things to worry about than some petty power struggle over who gets to run a single system.’
Skade shook her head. ‘It’s too late, I’m afraid. There have been too many deaths, too many broken promises, too many atrocities. The conflict has spread to other systems, wherever there are Conjoiners and Demarchists.’ She smiled, though the smile looked forced, as if her face would instantly spring back to its neutral state the moment she relaxed her muscles. ‘Things aren’t quite as desperate as you’d imagine. The war is turning in our favour, slowly but surely. Clavain returned twenty-two years ago, and immediately began to make a difference. Until his return we had been on the defensive, falling into the trap of acting like a true hive mind. That made our movements very easy for the enemy to predict. Clavain snapped us out of that prison.’
Galiana tried to force the memory of the wolves from her mind, thinking back to the time she had first met Clavain. It had been on Mars, when he had been fighting against her, a soldier in the Coalition for Neural Purity. The Coalition opposed her mind-augmenting experiments and saw the utter annihilation of the Conjoiners as the only tolerable outcome.
But Clavain had seen the larger picture. First, as her prisoner, he had made her realise how terrifying her experiments had seemed to the rest of the system. She had never really grasped that until Clavain patiently explained it to her, over many months of incarceration. Later, when he had been freed and terms of cease-fire were being negotiated, it was Clavain who had brought in the Demarchists to act as a neutral third party. The Demarchists had drawn up the cease-fire document and Clavain had pushed Galiana until she signed it. It had been a masterstroke, cementing an alliance between the Demarchists and the Conjoiners that would endure for centuries, until the Coalition for Neural Purity barely merited a footnote in history. Conjoiners continued with their neurological experiments, which were tolerated and even encouraged provided they made no attempts to absorb other cultures. Demarchists made use of their technologies, brokering them to other human factions.