Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds Page B

Galiana said, “but none of it will mean much to you. You’d need years of education, or deeper neural machinery, for that—building cognitive layers. We read all this almost subliminally.”
    Galiana was dressed differently now. He could still see the vague shape of her grey outfit, but layered around it were billowing skeins of light, unravelling at their edges into chains of Boolean logic. Icons danced in her hair like angels. He could see, faintly, the web of thought linking her with the other Conjoiners.
    She was inhumanly beautiful.
    “You said things were much worse,” Clavain said. “Are you ready to show me now?”
    She took him to see Felka again, passing on the way through deserted nursery rooms, populated now only by bewildered mechanical animals. Felka was the only child left in the nursery.
    Clavain had been deeply disturbed by Felka when he had seen her before, but not for any reason he could easily express. Something about the purposefulness of her actions, performed with ferocious concentration, as if the fate of creation hung on the outcome of her game. Felka and her surroundings had not changed at all since his previous visit. The room was still austere to the point of oppressive-ness. Felka looked the same. In every respect it was as if only an instant had passed since their first meeting; as if the onset of war and the assaults against the nest—the battle in which this was only an interlude—were only figments from someone else’s troubling dream; nothing that need concern Felka in her devotion to the task at hand.
    And the task awed Clavain.
    Before, he had watched her make strange gestures in the empty air in front of her. Now the machines in his head revealed the purpose those gestures served. Around Felka— cordoning her like a barricade—was a ghostly representation of the Great Wall.
    She was doing something to it.
    It was not a scale representation, Clavain knew. The Wall looked much higher here in relation to its diameter. And the surface was not the nearly invisible membrane of the real thing, but something like etched glass. The etching was a filigree of lines and junctions, descending down to smaller and smaller scales in fractal steps until the blur of detail was too fine for his eyes to discriminate. It was shifting and altering colour, and Felka was responding to these alterations with what he now saw was frightening efficiency. It was as if the colour changes warned of some malignancy in part of the Wall, and by touching it—expressing some tactile code—Felka was able to restructure the etching to block and neutralise the malignancy before it spread.
    “I don’t understand,” Clavain said. “I thought we destroyed the Wall, completely killed its systems.”
    “You only ever injured it,” Galiana said, “stopped it from growing, and from managing its own repair processes correctly . . . but you never truly killed it.”
    Sandra Voi had guessed, Clavain realised. She had wondered how the Wall had survived this long.
    Galiana told him the rest: how they had managed to establish control pathways to the Wall from the nest, fifteen years earlier—optical cables sunk deep below the worm zone. “We stabilised the Wall’s degradation with software running on dumb machines,” she said. “But when Felka was born we found that she managed the task just as efficiently as the computers; in some ways better than they ever did. In fact, she seemed to thrive on it. It was as if in the Wall she found . . .” Galiana trailed off. “I was going to say a friend.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “Because the Wall’s just a machine. If Felka recognised kinship with it . . . what would that make her?”
    “Someone lonely, that’s all.” Clavain watched the girl’s motions. “She seems faster than before. Is that possible?”
    “I told you things had deteriorated. She’s having to work harder to hold the Wall together.”
    “Warren must have attacked it.” Clavain said. “The