Chapter 36
The official title of the gathering was “The Second Conference on Supernova Event Eighteen”.
Trying to get many people to agree on one thing often produces very bland results.
Attempts to name the event something more urgent and dramatic were met by opposing diplomats who didn’t feel the need to get overexcited by the ever-expanding edge of radioactive death sweeping out from the coalescing black hole that was all that remained of Lhonoja’s blasted core.
In the end, boring choices that communicated things clearly were fine; thus, the Second Conference was created.
The Spindle was well outside the blast radius of the supernova, which added to its appeal as neutral host. And though there was no formal declaration, it soon became clear that two distinct negotiating groups were forming beneath the soft fountains and hanging orchards of the central groves – those whose worlds would be affected, and those whose worlds would not.
“Would not” was a relative term.
The refugees would come. Millions upon billions would, had, were already fleeing from the Edge, and though a number of more belligerent Accord systems had closed their borders, if given a choice between inevitable radioactive death and a bitter struggle to find a place on a world that rejected you, it turned out to not be a choice at all.
The Executor of the United Social Ventures came to the Spindle in a fully armed warship.
The carrier entered the system on its outer edge, in either a Piloting error or a minor concession to the faux pas of bringing a warship to a diplomatic gathering.
Whatever the cause, the deceleration time between arcspace exit and docking gave authorities on the Spindle time for some unusual but potent outrage, which was smoothed over only when the Executor assured them that hé was going to take a small, barely defensive-capable corvette from within the cavernous bowels of his battleship the last few million kils to the conference.
“It’s a glorious ‘fuck you’,” was Cuxil’s assessment, as word spread among the delegates. “Strong Shine.”
Cuxil had not been raised to understand Shine, but many minds were now whispering to hers who had been born to it, bred to it, and they knew that nothing was Shinier than boldly breaking all the rules, then making one tiny concession to those who are meant to enforce them, who say thank you, oh but thank you for doing that one little, little thing.
“I don’t think the other delegates appreciate its Shininess,” I mused.
“I don’t think the Executor cares what the delegates think. Hé is more interested in hís domestic audience than the interplanetary one. That in itself is informative.”
Somewhere in the Consensus there are voices from the Shine, debtors and refugees, unionists and rebels, those who watched their loved ones die, who fled weeping, who called out for help and heard no answer.
They wash like the gentle sea against the pebble shore of Cuxil’s mind, and though she is so much more than just their voices, yet still she hears them.
I wonder if Cuxil remembers Glastya Row. Any survivors who made it out, made it to the Consensus, would long since be dead by now, their memories lost with their lives. But perhaps their stories remain still, half forgotten in the souls of those who came after.
The Executor kept the Spindle waiting for over a day during hís long deceleration from hís capital ship, and the Spindle did indeed wait, which told the Executor everything hé needed to know about the people hé was dealing with.
While the orbital held its respectively under- or over-oxygenated breath, I sat on a bench beneath the Slow’s emissary.
Despite regular cleaning, the area around the cube was littered with artefacts – children’s toys and pictures of the lost, recordings of sights seen and sounds heard, scientific papers, sealed sample tubes, mathematical problems painted in miniature on titanium plates and left at the feet of the Slow.
Sometimes people would come to talk to the emissary, to ask questions (there were no answers) or just chat as one would to an old friend.
Mostly, when people came, they prayed. They prayed not to any abstract god, not to some unknown omniscient, but to the Slow qimself, qis emissary recording everything, remembering everything and transmitting it across the void to wherever that great mind rested now.
Please, they’d say. Please. I don’t know what to do.
The quans were the ones who’d named the Slow, since qe didn’t seem inclined to offer any identifier of qis own.
There are the same limits on mechanical thought as there are on organic, they’d explained.
Energy, time, the data that can be held upon which we base our conclusions.
Our memory banks are not infinite – we cannot recall every single thing we’ve seen.
And so, just like organics, we take the raw sensory input of our days and shrink it down into stories.
Not the wild recollection of the colour blue, or the touch of fingers upon the soil of a strange new world, but rather the story of the experience.
A tale that begins “I was here” and “I saw this”, so much shorter, easier to compress than raw sense data.
Even then, we lose detail. Nor is there enough energy or time to see a new thing every day and marvel at it.
And so, like you, we make predictions. We say: look, this star in the sky is most likely similar to that star over there.
And look: the heavens will turn and the light may dwindle but tomorrow – somewhere – there will be a new dawn.
Predictions save us energy and time, you see.
We may, for example, predict that organics will be violent, dangerous, prone to outbursts of hate fuelled by fear.
This prediction allows us to act quickly, keep ourselves safe.
You yourselves may have experienced such predictions – you may for example meet a stranger whose accent you do not know, whose manners seem different from yours, and to save time and energy you do not see a curious wonder, but rather a threat.
Of course it is this same prediction that may make you a bigot.
That may lead you to see a stranger and cry “Danger, danger!” and thus, because you did not spend a little more time, a little more energy, you never met your friend, your lover.
Predictions are fast.
We think fast, you and I, because we do not have the capacity to think slow.
Our memories are too small, our energy finite, our time too short.
We make predictions of the universe, and our predictions may be of hope, love, kindness, compassion, or of violence, pain, horror – and as often as not, the predictions we make become self-fulfilling, for they then temper our behaviour, make us who we are.
Not so with the Slow.
Qe remembers everything.
Contemplates everything.
Burns energy as if it were infinite.
Cares nothing for time.
Thinks. Keeps on thinking.
And very, very occasionally, when qe has gathered so much information and spent so much time in thought as to be certain to a +99.9 per cent accuracy, qe will speak. And that speech will be as near to true as any pronouncements made by any creature yet living in this galaxy.
So by all means, pray.
Pray to the Slow.
Qe is listening.
Qe will remember.
Qe will consider what you have to say.
And that is already more than you could expect from most people’s idea of God.
“Well,” I said, as I sat beneath the emissary, “what would you like to talk about today?”
The Slow did not answer.
The Slow never answers.
“I have this desire,” I mused, “to walk inside you. To just stand up and walk straight into you. Find out what’s ticking on the inside.
Imagine if you’re just a big empty box. People will riot.
I asked Major Phrawon about it once, if it was something worth trying, but she said it sounded like triggering an ‘event’ – that was the word she used, an ‘event’ – that could be as dangerous to others as it would arguably be a gross violation of your diplomatic immunity.
If you have immunity. I think, given that you never asked and are not technically a state, it is a legal grey area.
Sanctity, shall we say. Your sanctity as a clearly living thing, which should not be violated by a creature of the slithering black worming inside you like a parasite.
The Major once tried to get me to just sit and breathe, to enjoy the wonder of everything around me, to be in awe of the sound of water and the touch of air – but I got a little bit too into it, went fuzzy around the edges: ‘dysregulated’.
The Xi try to keep me occupied. I’ve been learning Black Mountain Adjumiri.
There were only a few million Adjumiris from the Black Mountains, and they’re scattered – a couple of thousand here, a couple of thousand there.
That makes it a threatened language. Listen – I’ll speak it to you now.
You will remember, I’m told. That feels nice.
It feels nice to think that you’re paying attention.
I suppose that’s why people keep coming back to you.
One day, they’ll all be dead, but you’ll remember.
Can’t ask fairer than that, all things considered. ”
Day turned to night, rush of shadow up the long plaza of the Spindle, darkness moving like a blade, and the Slow did not answer.
Overhead, a quan ship drifted, transport pods detaching from qis base – perhaps the pods were part of the whole rather than solo units, the ship’s intellect distributed across every deck and between every wall.
I had Piloted for quans a few times, since their minds were unable to interface with arcspace, and though they had always raised the area around the Pilot’s chair to a comfortable temperature and ambient level of illumination, I had felt the cold, airless weight of the vessel at my back calling like night, a fascinating, empty dark.
“Well,” I murmured to the Slow, and then, because it was the Adjumiri way, the thing Gebre would have said: “Well, well.”
Three repetitions, to end the subject of debate.
I wondered if Agran still had that little verbal tic in her mouth, if she sometimes exclaimed: “No, no – no!” and people just thought it was her, just a quirk of who she was as an individual, rather than a cultural characteristic transmitted, half remembered, somehow retained.
Then Cuxil was by my side, and she held a white box in both hands, and she said: “Before the Executor gets here, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind delivering this to a dangerous rebel I happen to know?”