Chapter 33
Some four hundred light years from the collapsed husk of Lhonoja, there is an orbital habitat called the Spindle.
It drifts around the gas giant known as Mama Ryukch, a silver needle piercing the dark.
Centuries old, it is the embodiment of that ancient question: if every hull panel and water recycler, every circuit board and viewing pane, every solar panel and EM field condenser has been changed at least once over the course of the station’s life, is it still the same station?
The inhabitants of the Spindle, who are bored of hearing this question, snap their fingers in indignation. Of course it is, they exclaim. Of course it is! The Spindle is not metal and silicon! It is our home! Though every part of it and us may change and evolve, home is universal!
The Spindle was built as a comms exchange.
At its height it held over forty-five thousand tanglecomm pairs, with operators boasting that a ship carrying just one half of a pair could, through its connection with the Spindle, be patched through to more destinations than any other exchange in the galaxy.
For a while, nearly all of the Spindle’s population had worked on the exchange, turning a one-to-one communications tool into a sprawling network of connection, all without the faff – and danger – of trying to communicate through arcspace.
Their promise was vast interplanetary coverage, responsive customer service and, of course, absolute discretion.
Naturally, such promises were nothing if not lures for competitors and data miners, resulting in rival exchanges popping up all over the place promising the highest security or the cheapest service or the most obscure connections to the furthest corners of the Accord.
As these rivals grew, the Spindle diversified, adding a range of diplomatic services from customisable atmospheric and gravitational meeting areas through to mediation councils versed in the cultural and linguistic niceties of every major and minor civilisation known.
Everyone knew you got more done in person, or at least appeared to do as far as public relations were concerned, and your ambassadors would experience neither anaphylaxis nor atmos-induced deep-vein thrombosis during meetings in these well-appointed halls: that was the Spindle guarantee.
At first these services were used only occasionally, talked about by few despite the relentless advertising campaign plugged into the holding music of the tanglecomm exchange. A few commercial deals were hammered out; a border skirmish was settled before it could become anything more.
Then they found the Slow.
It was possible that qis emissary had been there for decades without anyone noticing.
They discovered it sitting behind a maintenance panel in a particularly boring section of internal aquatics, a box two metrics by two metrics, perfectly black, without marking or indentation, its matt surface cool to the touch.
When questions were asked of it, it made no reply, and, as with all things Slow, it was entirely impervious to scan, absorbing the signals that were thrown at it without even bothering to warm a little in the attempt.
Some on the Spindle argued for its ejection into space.
Others said it was a sign, indicative of just how important their work was, how vital their efforts could be.
In the end, this latter group won, largely because everyone likes to feel important, and the emissary was moved from aquatics to a plinth in the middle of the central plaza, so that those who walked beneath it could know that for whatever reason, the single most powerful mind in the universe was watching.
A few people worshipped it. A few people always do.
Others said they wouldn’t come to the Spindle while it was there, but more came than left, drawn by the idea that what happened here might be important.
That in a hundred, maybe even two hundred, maybe a thousand years’ time, the Slow might speak, might pronounce a conclusion from qis great calculations, and that might be because of them, because of something qis emissary had observed on the Spindle.
Over time, even the doubters became habituated to the Slow’s black box, sitting on its plinth in the middle of a water garden.
The Slow simply didn’t do enough to merit anyone’s especial anxiety.
Then Lhonoja, the supernova, the death of Adjumir, Exodus.
I imagined most people had never heard of Glastya Row, wouldn’t know what had happened there – and indeed, most people did not.
But the sign of the binary sun was spreading across the Shine, and millions, billions of Adjumiris were waking up under foreign skies, and at the beginning of the end, there had been the Slow.
Not that qe had spoken since that first, world-shaking pronouncement.
If qe was a god, as philosophers sometimes argued qe could be seen to be, qe showed very little sign of caring.
Despite this, it was on the Spindle that the Accord at last gathered, sixteen years after the death of Adjumir, to discuss the scouring of worlds.
Ambassadors came from all across the civilised world.
Humans, of course, and quans – and more besides.
The scuttling aka, uke and fujiva came from worlds hundreds of light years away, the outer wings of the station pressurised to just the right chemical consistencies, gravity tweaked up and down for these astonishing arrivals and their very personal preferences.
It was unusual – so incredibly unusual – for non-humans to interest themselves in these affairs of state.
Distance, culture, simple atmospheric needs all stood as polite barriers between various species and giving a damn, and yet here they were.
People whispered: Does the Slow speak to them too? and inevitably the answer was yes, even if they didn’t talk about it. The Slow did not care about the layout of your internal organs or the shape of your limbs. Only life interested qim.
To everyone’s surprise, the Shine came too.
And so did I.