Redemption Ark

‘I never thought it was, Clavain. What about the other matter, the woman I hear you saved?’

‘Ah. Funny how word gets around.’ Then he recalled that it had been he who had told the children about Antoinette Bax.

‘Was she surprised?’

‘I don’t know. Should she have been?’

Felka snorted. She floated in the middle of the chamber, a bloated planet attended by many delicate wooden moons. She wore baggy brown work clothes. At least a dozen partially worked objects were guyed to her waist by nylon filaments. Other lines were hooked into woodworking tools, which ranged from broaches and files to lasers and tiny tethered burrowing robots.

I imagine she expected to die,‘ Clavain said. ’Or at the very least to be assimilated.‘

‘You seem upset by the fact that we’re hated and feared.’

‘It does give one pause for thought.’

Felka sighed, as if they had been over this a dozen times already. ‘How long have we known each other, Clavain?’

‘Longer than most people, I suppose.’

‘Yes. And for most of that time you were a soldier. Not always fighting, I’ll grant you that. But you were always a soldier a heart.’ Still with one eye on him, she hauled in one of her creations and peered through its latticed wooden interstices. ‘It strikes me that it might be a little late in the day for moral qualms, don’t you agree?’

‘You’re probably right.’

Felka bit her lower lip and, using a thicker line, propelled herself towards one wall of the chamber. Her entourage of wooden creations and tools clattered against each other as she moved. She set about making tea for Clavain.

‘You didn’t need to touch my face when I came in,’ Clavain remarked. ‘Should I take that as a good sign?’

‘In what way?’

‘It occurred to me that you might be getting better at discriminating faces.’

‘I’m not. Didn’t you notice the wall of faces on your way in?’

‘You must have done that recently,’ Clavain said.

‘When someone comes in here that I’m not sure about, I touch their face, mapping its contours with my ringers. Then I compare what I’ve mapped with the faces I’ve carved in the wall until I find a match. Then I read off the name. Of course, I have to add new faces now and then, and some need less detail than others…’

‘But me…?’

‘You have a beard, Clavain, and a great many lines. You have thin white hair. I could hardly fail to recognise you, could I? You’re not like any of the others.’

She passed him his bulb. He squeezed a stream of scalding tea into his throat. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much point denying it.’

He looked at her with as much detachment as he could muster, comparing the way she was now with his memory of her before he had left on Nightshade. It was only a matter of weeks, but in his estimation Felka had become more withdrawn, less a part of the world than at any time in recent memory. She spoke of visitors, but he had the strong suspicion that there had not been very many.

‘Clavain?’

‘Promise me something, Felka.’ He waited until she had turned to look at him. Her black hair, which she wore as long as Galiana had, was matted and greasy. Nodes of sleep dust nestled in the corners of her eyes. Her eyes were pale green, almost jade, the irises jarring against bloodshot pale pink. The skin beneath them was swollen and faintly blue, as if bruised. Like Clavain, Felka had a need for sleep that marked her as unusual amongst the Conjoined.

‘Promise you what, Clavain?’

‘If — when — it gets too bad, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’

‘What good would it do?’

‘You know I’d always try to do my best for you, don’t you? Especially now that Galiana isn’t here for us.’

Her raw-rubbed eyes studied him. ‘You always did your best, Clavain. But you can’t help what I am. You can’t work miracles.’

He nodded sadly. It was true, but knowing it hardly helped.

Felka was not like the other Conjoiners. He had met her for the first time during his second trip to Galiana’s nest on Mars. The product of an aborted experiment in foetal brain manipulation, she had been a tiny damaged child, not merely unable to recognise faces, but unable to interact with other people at all. Her entire world revolved around a single endlessly absorbing game. Galiana’s nest had been encircled by a giant structure known as the Great Wall of Mars. The Wall was a failed terraforming project that had been damaged in an earlier war. Yet it had never collapsed, for Felka’s game involved coaxing the Wall’s self-repair mechanisms into activity, an endless, intricate process of identifying flaws and allocating precious repair resources. The two-hundred-kilometre-high Wall was at least as complex as a human body, and it was as if Felka controlled every single aspect of its healing mechanisms, from the tiniest cell upwards. Felka turned out to be much better at holding the Wall together than a mere machine. Though her mind was damaged to the point where she could not relate to people at all, she had an astonishing ability for complex tasks.