Chapter 55
I woke, and wasn’t suffocating.
This was unexpected enough that for a moment I doubted my senses.
Quan ships have a certain quality that is immediately distinct from any imaginations of the afterlife.
The air has a smell like the edge of a thunderstorm, but is almost painfully, throat-scratchingly dry, being pumped in only for those rare occasions when organics visit.
The gravity is usually lighter than humans find comfortable, if it is even dialled in for anything other than accelerational consistency.
No panels flash; no lights shine except temporary globes dragged in for organic eyes.
Rather, interface ports line every other panel, above and below, and access grilles through which endless scuttling maintenance drones, extensions of the ship’s conscious mind, busy themselves about the vessel.
This is not to say that quan vessels are entirely without adornment.
Though there are some mainframes that have no interest whatsoever in anything resembling art, others have embraced the idea, unleashing units with varying parameters of dexterity, observation, predictive power, sensory power, etc.
, with the sole order of finding a way to express in a non-binary visual or auditory form what they consider the highest priority memories in their databanks.
The results have ranged from the stunningly banal – dry-as-dust encyclopaedic descriptions marred with the footnote: This would be more accurately expressed mathematically – to the extraordinary, sculptures of twisted glass and symphonies of rippling, gut-churning sound as the separated consciousnesses of the mainframe seek to answer a question as old as minds themselves: What matters?
If there is only so long to live before heat decays to cold, and so much energy with which to travel, to see, to think: What do we believe is important?
And as a footnote to that question, its lingering conclusion: And who do we think we are?
The interior of the room I opened my eyes in was clearly of this nature, for every wall had been lightly laser-carved with a thousand dancing shapes, ranging from spirals of DNA through to a glorious abstract impression of the retina of an animal’s eye.
There was something familiar about it, something striking in the question it was trying to solve, though as the fog of my thoughts receded into the dull, throbbing headache of post-oxygen deprivation, I could not put my finger on what.
There was no furniture, except for the Pilot’s chair, and I woke on the floor.
Someone had cut through my survival suit to get the helmet off, leaving a ragged line of torn mesh around my throat.
I blinked, and blinked again, and slowly coalesced the creature that hovered above me into what appeared, for all I could tell, to be an oversized metal amphibian.
Qis skin was a bright crystalline green, qis optical inputs were either side of a snout-like head, qe had four limbs ending each in six fingers, and a hard shell on qis back that was clearly formed with a biophilic aesthetic in mind, but still had to be a high-efficiency solar converter.
I tried to sit up to take a better look at qim, and qe belched: “You will feel dreadful and then you will feel worse. Please remain still for a few moments more.”
Qis efforts towards anthropomorphic incarnation had not extended as far as mobilising qis jaw, which I suspected hid a panoply of delicate chemical sensors rather than a dynamic speaker unit, but qe gently pushed me back down in a way that suggested some understanding of organic anatomy, maybe even some weak concept of bedside manner.
I tried to ask where I was, and my first attempt was like the cracking of broken metal.
The quan beside me hopped over to a wall unit, extended a hand. A nozzle emerged from the laser-carved wall; discharged water into the sealed hollow of qis palm. Qe turned back to me, held the liquid up to my lips, supported my head as I drank, eased me back down.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You are very welcome.”
Qe was speaking Assembly Adjumiri. The realisation was not a punch, so much as a slow-drifting question that rose less with the warmth of comfort than a shimmering of unease. “Maolcas? The Nitashi I was with?”
“They are being attended to. They have sustained damage.”
“That is my fault.”
“They are not dead.”
“I am glad.”
“Do you feel well enough to attempt to stand – slowly?”
“I can try.”
Qe hopped back a few steps to give me room as I eased up to my elbows, my knees, one leg, both, catching myself briefly on the wall as I swayed, steadied, breathed.
Every part hurt, but the pain was muffled, smothered by medication.
I felt too tired to ask what. The quan watched in silence, then said: “The ship wishes to speak to you.”
“That’s good. I’d like to speak to the ship.”
“The ship can speak to you now, and is listening, but suggests that you might wish to go to the airlock port before you communicate. It will better explain the situation.”
“You’re not going to space me, are you?”
“We would not have saved you if that was our intent.”
“That’s what I thought. Lead on.”
The quan led me down a hall, shoulder-tight, a thing for scurrying drones not organics used to a little more space.
Qe scuttled along the wall just in front of me, limbs sticking to metal with a soft magnetic clatter as qe moved, stopping occasionally to turn qis head just a little too far back on qis neck to check on me, waiting for me to catch up as I pressed my way, shoulder to metal, behind qim.
Around me, the ship hummed, soft and warm, but I could hear the hissing of compartment doors closing at my back, areas venting where I had been and that no longer needed to waste energy on pressure and air.
The airlock had a viewing port. Sometimes even a quan’s full-spectrum sensory array may fail, and qe will be forced to rely on that most basic of physical receptors – looking out of the window. At the gesturing of my guide, I pressed my nose against it and stared into the dark.
For a moment, I didn’t know what I was seeing.
Saw nothing at all.
Then the slight sense of wrongness, the thing that wasn’t quite right about the black, adjusted in my field of vision, and I understood.
The sphere was far enough away that I could just take in its edges, and it was only because I had read about it, studied it, heard the rumours that I had any sense that it was massive and distant rather than near and small.
In the deepest dark, there was nothing to measure it against, no sunlight to glint upon it, no sweep of familiar stars against whose disruption I could judge its shape.
Not it.
Qim.
The Slow… a Slow… the Slow – these distinctions were so hard to pin down – sat there, darker than the dark, directly outside the airlock of the ship, a perfect sphere of black.
I thought for a moment I would cry, and didn’t know why; pressed my hand into the glass of the airlock door as if I could push through it, reach out to touch the Slow itself – felt a sudden surge of fear that I might do exactly that, that having been rescued I might turn to shadow and thought and drift back out into the night that had nearly consumed me.
Yanked my hand away. Turned to my guide with tears pricking my eyes and no idea why and mumbled: “I would like to talk to the ship now.”
The little quan didn’t answer.
Instead, a voice, warm and familiar, spoke from all around, rippled down the corridor, echoing and bouncing away on hard metal. “Hello,” said Rencki. “It is good to see you again.”