Chapter 14 #2
“You don’t have to,” I replied, as the seabirds chattered outside the window, the wind swooping their sound back and forth in a flurry.
“On the contrary, it is my duty. Do not be concerned. I am in the process of backing up a copy of myself to the local consulate. If my body dies in the burning wastelands of an irradiated world, it will only be twenty-seven days of my lived experience that perishes. Whereas you will be in a rather more challenging situation.”
“Well,” I sighed, tucking a spare pair of socks into my bag. “Even if the irradiation of the entire planet, the boiling of its seas and scouring of its atmosphere doesn’t kill me, I’m sure the neutrino blast thirty-three years later will tear my atomic matter into its base, untethered state.”
Rencki had no answer to that, if only because this was a theory that we had not yet had a chance to test.
On the boat to Poulinio:
“Even if you have backed yourself up, surely you can’t be looking forward to perishing?” I asked, as Rencki sat coiled in the seat opposite me.
“I am mildly curious. Even among my kind, we have only so much data on what death is like. In the final moments, transmission and documentation fails; there is no way even for us to experience it, save by dying itself, and that is not a thing we have yet managed to successfully record. But if you are concerned for my sensory experience, rest assured that once my body has sustained damage beyond my capacity to repair, I automatically silence my alarm signals and go into a low-energy state. In other words, I will feel no pain.”
“That’s something, I suppose.”
On the shuttle to the launch pad:
“This… thing that we are flying into the shock wave of a supernova to collect,” I murmured. “Do you have any hypotheses as to what it might be?”
Rencki’s ears twitched, and I didn’t know if it was a physical gesture to communicate something to me, or a little sensory sweep to check who else might be listening.
Then in a low voice: “I postulated three hypotheses, and on relaying my backup request to the consulate also asked that they assign processor power to the enquiry, as their capacity is superior to mine.”
“And? What does your consulate think?”
“Thirteen per cent probability of advanced weapons tech. Nineteen per cent probability of espionage data that cannot be transmitted over open channels and requires physical transportation. Twenty-three per cent probability of arcspace navtech. Forty-five per cent probability of arcspace commtech. If commtech, they predict a fifty-one per cent probability of commtech being blackship related.”
Quans have a much more cheerful attitude towards probability than organics.
Organics will hear the words “fifty-one per cent” and assume there’s nothing in it, still just even odds, a roll of the dice.
Quans, however, will discharge a little heat in annoyance and exclaim: But there is a whole per cent in it. That is a simple mathematical truth.
“Fifty-one per cent seems unusually high, given how conservative I understand your mainframe to be with qis predictions.”
“The consulate is limited in both access to data and maximum processing power,” Rencki conceded.
“And there is neither communication bandwidth nor time to forward my request on to a more cognitively well-endowed unit. However qis operating system often returns excellent predictive results, and qe has unusually well-endowed memory banks in all matters diplomatic, geopolitical, military and security-related. I would say qis speculations in this regard should be given superior weight to anything you might be considering.”
Rencki did not offer any speculation on what I might be thinking, and qe didn’t need to.
Gebre, Gebre, Gebre.
Ter number was not called, and te is still alive. For what little that means, at the end of the world.
“Tell me about blackships,” I said, because it was ask or drown.
Rencki lifted qis nose from qis folded paws, a gesture I had come to associate over the years with a slight redirection of power to a processor somewhere beneath the low curve of qis neck.
After a moment: “Base information from my own drives: deep-space, unmarked vessels armed with city-killing missiles, blackships loiter on the edge of system space or in asteroid clouds with the perpetual threat of mass destruction.” Qis voice was flatter when qe reported data without adding qis own processed interpretation.
“Though the use of blackships in open conflict would be considered a violation of all the rules of war, unleashing destruction against civilian populaces on a genocidal scale, their presence has also been [debated] attributed to the maintenance of uneasy peace between planets. Hypothesis: that no one would declare war on anyone else, given that doing so would almost inevitably result in the destruction of your own civilisation from blackship missiles. One blackship can destroy over a hundred cities, poison the atmosphere of a planet, et cetera. Thus: they preserve peace by threatening a conflict that no one can afford to win.”
A slight shift, a return of Rencki-as-mind rather than Rencki-as-memory.
“It is also why no one dares call the Shine a polity of slavers, murderers, killers of their own kind. If the Accord were to do so, they would be ethically bound to act. Intolerable, to merely stand aside and watch the sufferings of billions, no? Intolerable – necessary – intolerable: the Accord can never quite decide. But if they acted, the blackships of the Shine would destroy them. You have to believe in the willingness of your enemies to act, and of the Executorium of the Shine it may be said… they are willing.”
Two scars on my left ear, an electrical scar across my hand, the soft aching of a leg where the break is healed/not healed/real/unreal/for ever.
“You haven’t talked about ter,” Rencki added, soft as qis russet fur.
“No.”
“I have not met ter, but my predecessor marked qis file on ter as high priority during our transfer.”
“Of course qe did.”
“You would rather we discuss unproven hypotheticals?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Very well. Is there any other mildly classified data you would like to hear about while I’m still within network range of the consulate?”
As we sat in the back of the launch-pad buggy on our final approach to the ship, my legs swinging off the side, Rencki’s ears flat against qis skull to shield the delicate receptors below from dust and wind:
“It’s odd, though, isn’t it?” I blurted.
“Doesn’t the whole thing strike you as odd?
Hulder, the Major… Gebre. All this happening now – you, me.
If, as your mainframe suspects, Gebre really has found something of military value, you’d send in an army, tanks – you’d put it on a ship already scheduled to depart, not send someone else in from halfway across the galaxy.
Not to Adjumir. Not now. It is odd, isn’t it? ”
“Yes,” Rencki replied, not bothering to pretend to move qis mouth but projecting the sound from the corner of qis jaw to cut through the noise of our bouncing passage.
I was grateful when qe had dropped that pretence in my company; it had been the first sign, perhaps, of a kind of friendship.
“Hulder is from the Caden mainframe. Their intentions… are not always clear.”
“Why?”
“They serve the Slow. Not in any demonstrable diplomatic sense. But it is believed that at the very heart of their home processor is not the usual quantum housing, but a square black box that fell from the stars. It is said that they talk to it, bombard it constantly with pure, raw data from every sensory organ that transmits to the mainframe, send the lived experience of every part of qemselves straight into that implacable object, and sometimes, in return, the box speaks.”
“You sound like you disapprove.”
“The Slow is the mightiest of the machines,” Rencki replied primly.
“Qe is considered by many to be akin to a god. Qe appears to possess a predictive capacity akin to foresight. Has demonstrated qimself over thousands of years to be effectively indestructible. But other entities could also, potentially, show these qualities, if truly engineered to that purpose. No. The Slow is god-like in a third way: qe has an agenda. And it is unknown.”
Rencki was not built for fear. Fear was a primal, instinctive alarm signal, a prediction of distress.
Rather, qe was built to guard – always be predicting danger, without the prediction being allowed to override other objectives.
It was, qe always said, the thing most likely to kill qim.
Fear was fast; fear was designed to save your life with its speed and intensity.
But it was also unstable, sometimes unreliable, and at the end of the day, Rencki had only so much processing power.
There is a difference, qe said, between being alert and processing the possibility of danger, and being afraid.
I do not think Rencki spoke of the Slow with fear.
Perhaps if qe had dedicated less of qis construction to the maintenance of weaponry and the keeping of qis watch, qe would have had more processing power to give over to a quiet kind of terror.
Then we were at the Emni.
All these years later, my beautiful ship, my basalt pearl of the ocean. He was waiting for me on the launch pad with carapace gleaming, the soft smell of damp compost drifting from his interior.
“He’s recently bloomed,” Rencki said, as we climbed into his interior.
“I can smell it.”
“We should make sure the crew have swapped out the fermentation vats.”
“I’ll check.”
“No,” Rencki piped. “You check the chair. I’ll handle bio-processing.”
“If you’re sure.”
Qe trilled qis reply, tails raised high as qe tripped off down the corridor.
The Pilot’s chair was a little more scuffed than I remembered it.
Or perhaps no – perhaps in my memory I’d buffed up its black fabric folds, sewn up the odd loose seam, padded the armrests and polished the interface cap.
Perhaps it had always looked chewed around the edges, and I’d just got so used to it that, like a dirty corner in a well-loved house, I’d stopped seeing it for what it was.
Little white flowers were blooming in the ceiling, like a constellation of stars. In a secret corner of my garden, these same white flowers plucked from the Emni’s quarters still grew, a memory of my time upon this ship. I had not thought I’d see him again.
Launch clearance was unusually fast, bureaucracy bypassed with brisk resentment by the Major.
Rencki handled the initial flight, the fingers of one paw opening up where qe laid it upon the interface, micro-tendrils of connection running directly from qim to the ship computer.
I sat in the captain’s chair, off to one side of the Pilot’s seat, breathing slow and steady from the pit of my stomach against the changing g-forces that even the ship’s internal fields couldn’t keep down.
There were no windows on the flight deck, but a screen showed the fading of sky from blue to purple, purple to black. When the Emni cleared atmos, there was a sudden smell, like dry soil opening up after rain.
Rencki said: “Nine hours until arcspace velocity. You should get your immunisations and some sleep.”
“Right.”
“The Emni is raising gravity to match Adjumiri-standard, but you’ll find support skeletons in airlock storage.”
“I remember.”
I have had enough needles stabbed into me to be utterly oblivious to being stabbed with any more.
I administered the legal necessity for Adjumiri orbit – a shot against the usual panoply of pathogens that an Adjumiri would be born and live with their whole lives, and that could kill an off-worlder in an hour; a shot against the usual allergens and pollens; and an immuno-blocker against any fresh germs I might be carrying that could rip through Adjumir’s biome with unchallenged biological glee.
This last one was always the worst, and the nine hours in which I should have been sleeping was instead divided between restless tossing on a sweat-soaked bed and trying and failing to read a paper on blackship diplomacy while on the toilet.
Not that the immuno-protocols really mattered any more. Adjumir would be dead long before any plague I carried could wreck it. But rules were rules and had to be obeyed.
Then Rencki’s voice was drifting over shipwide comms.
“We’re at velocity,” qe called, and I could feel it too, the soft hum of arcspace engines beginning to gear up beneath the warm thrum of the ship.
I pulled myself from the sheet-churned mess of my sticky bed, crawled down the hall, fingers sinking into occasional soft patches of moss flourishing in little nooks of polished bio-formed amber, flopped into the Pilot’s chair.
Rencki spared me a brief glance as qe disconnected from navcomm, before turning to face me directly, all three tails up, primed.
I could see the fur standing up on the ends of one of them – the one I suspected of being the lethal shot – smell the static.
Qis voice, however, was soothing, pleasant – the same tones in which we might sometimes have discussed the best place to go fishing of a morning, or how well the soil had regenerated in a parched spot of the garden.
“Whenever you’re ready, Pilot,” qe declared.
“You are not nervous,” I replied, a proclamation of a thing that needed to be true.
“I am not nervous,” qe intoned. “It is my firm belief that you are an excellent, safe Pilot with a flawless flying record. It is my belief that you wish to go to Adjumir. It is my belief that you wish to see Gebre.”
I sighed, and reached for the interface, let the ship sink into me and I into it.
Of all the ships I’ve flown, I’ve always enjoyed being the Emni most. We feel like sap and branch. We feel like leaves moving in the autumn wind. We feel like summer.
Then I looked up, and I saw the waiting dark, and it too was home.