“I told you things were worse than before. She’s having to work harder to hold the Wall together.”
“Warren must have attacked it.” Clavain said. “The possibility of knocking down the Wall always figured in our contingency plans for another war. I just never thought it would happen so soon.” Then he looked at Felka. Maybe it was imagination but she seemed to be working even faster than when he had entered the room; not just since his last visit. “How long do you think she can keep it together?”
“Not much longer,” Galiana said. “As a matter of fact I think she’s already failing.”
It was true. Now that he looked closely at the ghost Wall he saw that the upper edge was not the mathematically smooth ring it should have been; that there were scores of tiny ragged bites eating down from the top. Felka’s activities were increasingly directed to these opening cracks in the structure; instructing the crippled structure to divert energy and raw materials to these critical failure points. Clavain knew that the distant processes Felka directed were awesome. Within the Wall lay a lymphatic system whose peristaltic feed-pipes ranged in size from meters across to the submicroscopic; flowing with myriad tiny repair machines. Felka chose where to send those machines; her hand gestures establishing pathways between damage points and the factories sunk into the Wall’s ramparts which made the required types of machine. For more than a decade, Galiana said, Felka had kept the Wall from crumbling—but for most of that time her adversary had been only natural decay and accidental damage. It was a different game now that the Wall had been attacked again. It was not one she could ever win.
Felka’s movements were swifter; less fluid. Her face remained impassive, but in the quickening way that her eyes darted from point to point it was possible to read the first hints of panic. No surprise, either: the deepest cracks in the structure now reached a quarter of the way to the surface, and they were too wide to be repaired. The Wall was unzipping along those flaws. Cubic kilometers of atmosphere would be howling out through the openings. The loss of pressure would be immeasurably slow at first, for near the top the trapped cylinder of atmosphere was only fractionally thicker than the rest of the Martian atmosphere. But only at first …
“We have to get deeper,” Clavain said. “Once the Wall goes, we won’t have a chance in hell if we’re anywhere near the surface. It’ll be like the worst tornado in history.”
“What will your brother do? Will he nuke us?”
“No; I don’t think so. He’ll want to get hold of any technologies you’ve hidden away. He’ll wait until the dust storms have died down, then he’ll raid the nest with a hundred times as many troops as you’ve seen so far. You won’t be able to resist, Galiana. If you’re lucky you may just survive long enough to be taken prisoner.”
“There won’t be any prisoners,” Galiana said.
“You’re planning to die fighting?”
“No. And mass suicide doesn’t figure in our plans either. Neither will be necessary. By the time your brother reaches here, there won’t be anyone left in the nest.”
Clavain thought of the worms encircling the area; how small were the chances of reaching any kind of safety if it involved getting past them. “Secret tunnels under the worm zone, is that it? I hope you’re serious.”
“I’m deadly serious,” Galiana said. “And yes, there is a secret tunnel. The other children have already gone through it now. But it doesn’t lead under the worm zone.”
“Where, then?”
“Somewhere a lot further away.”
When they passed through the medical center again it was empty, save for a few swan-necked robots patiently waiting for further casualties. They had left Felka behind tending the Wall, her hands a manic blur as she tried to slow the rate of collapse. Clavain had tried to make her come with them, but Galiana had told him he was wasting his time: that she would sooner die than be parted from the Wall.
“You don’t understand,” Galiana said. “You’re placing too much humanity behind her eyes. Keeping the Wall alive is the single most important fact of her universe—more important than love, pain, death—anything you or I would consider definitively human.”
“Then what happens to her when the Wall dies?”
“Her life ends,” Galiana said.
Reluctantly he had left without her, the taste of shame in his mouth. Rationally it made sense: without Felka’s help the Wall would collapse much sooner and there was a good chance all their lives would end; not just that of the haunted girl. How deep would they have to go before they were safe from the suction of the escaping atmosphere? Would any part of the nest be safe?
The regions through which they were descending now were as cold and gray as any Clavain had seen. There were no entoptic generators buried in these walls to supply visual information to the implants Galiana had put in his head, and even her own aura of light was gone. They only met a few other Conjoiners, and they seemed to be moving in the same general direction; down to the nest’s basement levels. This was unknown territory to Clavain.
Where was Galiana taking him?
“If you had an escape route all along, why did you wait so long before sending the children through it?”
“I told you, we couldn’t bring them to Transenlightenment too soon. The older they were, the better,” Galiana said. “Now though …”
“There was no waiting any longer, was there?”
Eventually they reached a chamber with the same echoing acoustics as the topside hangar. The chamber was dark except for a few pools of light, but in the shadows Clavain made out discarded excavation equipment and freight pallets; cranes and de-activated robots. The air smelled of ozone. Something was still going on here.
“Is this the factory where you make the shuttles?” Clavain said.
“We manufactured parts of them here, yes,” Galiana said. “But that was a side-industry.”
“Of what?”
“The tunnel, of course.” Galiana made more lights come on. At the far end of the chamber—they were walking toward it—waited a series of cylindrical things with pointed ends; like huge bullets. They rested on rails, one after the other. The tip of the very first bullet was next to a dark hole in the wall. Clavain was about to say something when there was a sudden loud buzz and the first bullet slammed into the hole. The other bullets—there were three of them now—eased slowly forward and halted. Conjoiners were waiting to board them.
He remembered what Galiana had said about no one being left behind.
“What am I seeing here?”
“A way out of the nest,” Galiana said. “And a way off Mars, though I suppose you figured that part for yourself.”
“There is no way off Mars,” Clavain said. “The interdiction guarantees that. Haven’t you learned that with your shuttles?”
“The shuttles were only ever a diversionary tactic,” Galiana said. “They made your side think we were still striving to escape, whereas our true escape route was already fully operational.”
“A pretty desperate diversion.”
“Not really. I lied to you when I said we didn’t clone. We did—but only to produce brain-dead corpses. The shuttles were full of corpses before we ever launched them.”
For the first time since leaving Deimos Clavain smiled, amused at the sheer obliquity of Galiana’s thinking.
“Of course, there was another function,” she said. “The shuttles provoked your side into a direct attack against the nest.”
“So this was deliberate all along?”
“Yes. We needed to draw your side’s attention; to concentrate your military presence in low-orbit, near the nest. Of course we were hoping the offensive would come later than it did … but we reckoned without Warren’s conspiracy.”
“Then you are planning something.”
“Yes.” The next bullet slammed into the wall, ozone crackling from its linear induction rails. Now only two remained. “We can talk later. There isn’t much time now.” She projected an image in
to his visual field: the Wall, now veined by titanic fractures down half its length. “It’s collapsing.”
“And Felka?”
“She’s still trying to save it.”
He looked at the Conjoiners boarding the leading bullet; tried to imagine where they were going. Was it to any kind of sanctuary he might recognize—or to something so beyond his experience that it might as well be death? Did he have the nerve to find out? Perhaps. He had nothing to lose now, after all; he could certainly not return home. But if he was going to follow Galiana’s exodus, it could not be with the sense of shame he now felt in abandoning Felka.
The answer, when it came, was simple. “I’m going back for her. If you can’t wait for me, don’t. But don’t try and stop me doing this.”
Galiana looked at him, shaking her head slowly. “She won’t thank you for saving her life, Clavain.”
“Maybe not now,” he said.
He had the feeling he was running back into a burning building. Given what Galiana had said about the girl’s deficiencies—that by any reasonable definition she was hardly more than an automaton—what he was doing was very likely pointless, if not suicidal. But if he turned his back on her, he would become something even less than human himself. He had misread Galiana badly when she said the girl was precious to them. He had assumed some bond of affection … whereas what Galiana meant was that the girl was precious in the sense of a vital component. Now—with the nest being abandoned—the component had no further use. Did that make Galiana as cold as a machine herself—or was she just being unfailingly realistic? He found the nursery after only one or two false turns, and then Felka’s room. The implants Galiana had given him were again throwing phantom images into the air. Felka sat within the crumbling circle of the Wall. Great fissures now reached to the surface of Mars. Shards of the Wall, as big as icebergs, had fractured away and now lay like vast sheets of broken glass across the regolith.
She was losing, and now she knew it. This was not just some more difficult phase of the game. This was something she could never win, and her realization was now plainly evident in her face. She was still moving her arms frantically, but her face was red now, locked into a petulant scowl of anger and fear.
For the first time, she seemed to notice him.
Something had broken through her shell, Clavain thought. For the first time in years, something was happening that was beyond her control; something that threatened to destroy the neat, geometric universe she had made for herself. She might not have distinguished his face from all the other people who came to see her, but she surely recognized something … that now the adult world was bigger than she was, and it was only from the adult world that any kind of salvation could come.
Then she did something that shocked him beyond words. She looked deep into his eyes and reached out a hand.
But there was nothing he could do to help her.
Later—it seemed hours, but in fact could only have been tens of minutes—Clavain found that he was able to breathe normally again. They had escaped Mars now; Galiana, Felka and himself, riding the last bullet.
And they were still alive.
The bullet’s vacuum-filled tunnel cut deep into Mars; a shallow arc bending under the crust before rising again, two thousand kilometers away, well beyond the Wall, where the atmosphere was as thin as ever. For the Conjoiners, boring the tunnel had not been especially difficult. Such engineering would have been impossible on a planet that had plate tectonics, but beneath its lithosphere Mars was geologically quiet. They had not even had to worry about tailings. What they excavated, they compressed and fused and used to line the tunnel, maintaining rigidity against awesome pressure with some trick of piezo-electricity. In the tunnel, the bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for six minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to the legs to maintain bloodflow to the head. Even so, it was hard to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.
They were moving at ten kilometers a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trapdoor. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them … but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.
In half a minute, they were in true space.
“The Interdiction’s sensor web can’t track us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spy-sats directly over the nest. That was a mistake, Clavain—even though we did our best to reinforce your thinking with the shuttle launches. But now we’re well outside your sensor footprint.”
Clavain nodded. “But that won’t help us once we’re far from the surface. Then, we’ll just look like another ship trying to reach deep space. The web may be late locking onto us, but it’ll still get us in the end.”
“It would,” Galiana said. “If deep space was where we were going.”
Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain, thought, she would fall forever. If that was the case, he had only brought forward her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had inflicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess—even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years …
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
Galiana issued some neural command which made the bullet seem to become transparent.
“There,” she said.
Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in, until the object was much clearer.
Dark—misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.
“Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”
“Yes,” Galiana said.
“But the worms—”
“Don’t exist anymore.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed … but that was only what we wanted you to think.”
For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”
“Ever since the cease-fire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”
Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device which lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something which had never existed before in the whole of human experience.
He was looking at a starship.
“We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try and stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”
“Where are you going?”
“Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.”
“What about the Demarchists?”
“They won’t stop us.” It was said with total assurance—implying, what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumored that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.
Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”
/> “That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny—we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one tenth of a millimeter per second—but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Think about it. The tube in Mars was two thousand kilometers long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over six minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”
Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”
“Complete deceleration in one fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”
“I can’t survive that.”
“No; you can’t. Not now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be anything they can’t fix in Phobos.”
“It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”
“You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”
“And you still tell me none of this was planned?”
“No; but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though … you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind … at the back of our mind …”
“You always hoped it might come to this?”
Galiana smiled.
He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection Page 63