Alastair Reynolds: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

“It’s much worse than that,” Galiana said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not quite ready yet. But I can show you in a moment.”

He felt colder than ever now. “What do you mean, not quite ready?”

Galiana looked deep into his eyes now. “You took a serious head wound, Clavain. The entry wound was small, but the internal bleeding… it would have killed you, had we not intervened.” Before he could ask the inevitable question she answered it for him. “We injected a small cluster of medichines into your head. They undid the damage very easily. But it seemed provident to allow them to grow.”

“You’ve put replicators in my head?”

“You needn’t sound so horrified. They’re already growing—spreading out and interfacing with your existing neural circuitry—but the total volume of glial mass that they will consume is tiny: only a few cubic millimetres in total, across your entire brain.”

He wondered if she was calling his bluff. “I don’t feel anything.”

“You won’t—not for a minute or so.” Now she pointed into the empty pit in the middle of the room. “Stand here and look into the air.”

“There’s nothing there.”

But as soon as he had spoken, he knew he was wrong. There was something in the pit. He blinked and directed his attention somewhere else, but when he returned his gaze to the pit, the thing he imagined he had seen—milky, spectral—was still there, and becoming sharper and brighter by the second. It was a three-dimensional structure, as complex as an exercise in protein-folding. A tangle of loops and connecting branches and nodes and tunnels, embedded in a ghostly red matrix.

Suddenly he saw it for what it was: a map of the nest, dug into Mars. Just as the Coalition had suspected, the base was deeper than the original structure; far more extensive, reaching deeper down but much further out than anyone had imagined. Clavain made a mental effort to retain some of what he was seeing in his mind, the intelligence-gathering reflex stronger than the conscious knowledge that he would never see Deimos again.

“The medichines in your brain have interfaced with your visual cortex,” Galiana said. “That’s the first step on the road to Transenlightenment. Now you’re privy to the machine-generated imagery encoded by the fields through which we move—most of it, anyway.”

“Tell me this wasn’t planned, Galiana. Tell me you weren’t intending to put machines in me at the first opportunity.”

“No; I wasn’t planning it. But nor was I going to let your phobias stop me from saving your life.”

The image grew in complexity. Glowing nodes of light appeared in the tunnels, some moving slowly through the network.

“What are they?”

“You’re seeing the locations of the Conjoiners,” Galiana said. “Are there as many as you imagined?”

Clavain judged that there were no more than seventy lights in the whole complex now. He searched for a cluster which would identify the room where he stood. There: twenty-odd bright lights, accompanied by one much fainter. Himself, of course. There were few people near the top of the nest—the attack must have collapsed half the tunnels, or maybe Galiana had deliberately sealed entrances herself.

“Where is everyone? Where are the children?”

“Most of the children are gone now.” She paused. “You were right to guess that we were rushing them to Transenlightenment, Clavain.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only way out of here.”

The image changed again. Now each of the bright lights was connected to another by a shimmering filament. The topology of the network was constantly shifting, like a pattern seen in a kaleidoscope. Occasionally, too swiftly for Clavain to be sure, it shifted toward a mandala of elusive symmetry, only to dissolve into the flickering chaos of the ever-changing network. He studied Galiana’s node and saw that—even as she was speaking to him—her mind was in constant rapport with the rest of the nest.

Now something very bright appeared in the middle of the image, like a tiny star, against which the shimmering network paled almost to invisibility. “The network is abstracted now,” Galiana said. “The bright light represents its totality: the unity of Transenlightenment. Watch.”

He watched. The bright light—beautiful and alluring as anything Clavain had ever imagined—was extending a ray toward the isolated node which represented himself. The ray was extending itself through the map, coming closer by the second.

“The new structures in your mind are nearing maturity,” Galiana said. “When the ray touches you, you will experience partial integration with the rest of us. Prepare yourself, Nevil.”

Her words were unnecessary. His fingers were already clenched sweating on the railing as the light inched closer and engulfed his node.

“I should hate you for this,” Clavain said.

“Why don’t you? Hate’s always the easier option.”

“Because…” Because it made no difference now. His old life was over. He reached out for Galiana, needing some anchor against what was about to hit him. Galiana squeezed his hand and an instant later he knew something of Transenlightenment. The experience was shocking; not because it was painful or fearful, but because it was profoundly and totally new. He was literally thinking in ways that had not been possible microseconds earlier.

Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imagine how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not among them. But if he could not convey the core of the experience, he could at least skirt its essence with metaphor. It was like standing on the shore of an ocean, being engulfed by a wave taller than himself. For a moment he sought the surface; tried to keep the water from his lungs. But there happened not to be a surface. What had consumed him extended infinitely in all directions. He could only submit to it. Yet as the moments slipped by it turned from something terrifying in its unfamiliarity to something he could begin to adapt to; something that even began in the tiniest way to seem comforting. Even then he glimpsed that it was only a shadow of what Galiana was experiencing every instant of her life.

“Alright,” Galiana said. “That’s enough for now.”

The fullness of Transenlightenment retreated, like a fading vision of Godhead. What he was left with was purely sensory; no longer any direct rapport with the others. His state of mind came crashing back to normality.

“Are you alright, Nevil?”

“Yes…” His mouth was dry. “Yes; I think so.”

“Look around you.”

He did.

The room had changed completely. So had everyone in it.

His head reeling, Clavain walked in light. The formerly grey walls oozed beguiling patterns; as if a dark forest had suddenly become enchanted. Information hung in veils in the air; icons and diagrams and numbers clustering around the beds of the injured, thinning out into the general space like fantastically delicate neon sculptures. As he walked toward the icons they darted out of his way, mocking him like schools of brilliant fish. Sometimes they seemed to sing, or tickle the back of his nose with half-familiar smells.

“You can perceive things now,” 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.