Clavain called a battle realisation into view, appraising any changes that had taken place since he had gone to fetch his spacesuit. His ships swarmed around
[Then we won’t talk, will we?]
He looked at her, startled that she had spoken to him in the Conjoiner fashion, opening a window between their heads, pushing words and much more than words into his skull.
[It’s all right, Clavain. Just because I didn’t do this very often doesn’t mean I couldn’t…]
[You’re right. Normally I didn’t want to. But you aren’t just anyone.]
[Clavain: a word of warning. You can look all the way into my head. There are no barriers, no partitions, no mnemonic blockades. Not to you, at least. But don’t look too deeply. It’s not that you’d see anything private, or anything I’m ashamed of… it’s just…]
[Sometimes I can’t take it, Clavain, and I’ve lived with it since I was born.]
He could see into the surface layers of her personality, feel the surface traffic of her thoughts. The data was calm. There was nothing that he could not examine; no sensory experience or memory that he could not unravel and open as if it were one of his own. But beneath that calm surface layer, glimpsed like something rushing behind smoked glass, there lay a howling storm of consciousness. It was frantic and ceaseless, like a machine always on the point of ripping itself apart, but one that would never find respite in its own destruction.
He pulled back, terrified that he might fall in.
[You see what I mean?]
[It isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault, not even Galiana’s. It’s just the way lam.]
He understood then, perhaps more thoroughly than at any point since he had known her, just what Felka’s craving was like. Games, complex games, sated that howling machine, gave it something to work on, slowed it to something less furious. When she had been a child, the Wall had been all that she needed, but the Wall had been taken from her. After that, nothing had ever been enough. Perhaps the machine would have evolved as Felka grew. Or perhaps the Wall would always have turned out to be inadequate. All that mattered now was that she find surrogates for it: games or puzzles, labyrinths or riddles, which the machine could process and thereby give her the tiniest degree of inner calm.
[Even if they can’t change me — and I’m not even sure I want them to change me — they might at least give me something to think about, Clavain. So many alien minds have been imprinted in their seas, so many patterns stored. I might even be able to make sense of something that the other swimmers haven’t. I might even be valuable.]
[Of course.]
She must have read enough of his mind to see what he was about to ask. [I lied, Clavain. I lied to save you, to get you to turn around.]
He already knew; Skade had told him. But until now he had never entirely dismissed the possibility that Skade herself might have been lying; that Felka was indeed his daughter.