Chapter 58
Once, a conspiracy was hatched, between the Consensus and the Slow, two entities close enough to god-like that at this stage the difference is largely semantics.
It was the Consensus who led the charge.
Their numbers had been growing with refugees from the Shine who offered up their minds to the great collective, partly in search of belonging, and partly because they believed that, sooner or later, their pain would not go unanswered.
And though it knew what was happening to itself, the Consensus could not turn away hearts that were broken and souls in need, and thus the Consensus began to change.
Their dreams became heavy with sorrow and blazing injustice, and they started to turn their eyes towards the Shine.
Towards war. Better, they said, that millions of us should die than billions should feel this agony.
People often mistake the hive-minded nature of the Consensus as being akin to a kind of genius, but that is not it at all. The Consensus do not share some abstract state of higher cognition; they are in the end no more nor no less than human. And they know when they need help.
They went to the Slow.
“We are going to war,” they said. “Help us find a way to keep the most alive.”
And for the first time in thousands of years, the Slow answered.
Types of love that are cruel:
Love for a beloved who is dying. The doctors say they are suffering – they are suffering – there is nothing to be done, and they are suffering, let it end. But the lover cries out: No, no, hold on, my love, hold on, you have to hold on! I love you so much – hold on! And thus the agony continues.
Love for your people, for your nation, who you would die to serve. You love them so much you must fight, you must rage, you must kill, and in time you do not care who you kill, you do not care why; you just keep on killing because you love so much, and that is all that gives the killing meaning.
Self-love, which hears another weep and proclaims: Well, that’s all very well, but how do you think your feelings make me feel? and does not understand that this is not love at all.
Love for a child, which destroys them. The parent who whispers: I just want the best for you, why aren’t you being better?
The parent who whispers: You are already the best you could possibly be, you can do no wrong.
Love that hides truth, masks honesty, that mistakes control, oppression, power for caring, turns tormented children into bewildered adults who do not know how to love in turn.
Love that would let a world burn to save one person on it. The blindest of all possible loves, the most selfish, which cannot imagine that any of the billions of other lovers still living could ever love so deep, so true as you.
Centuries later, in qis very heart, the Slow said: “I HAVE SOMETHING FOR YOU.”
There was a drawer in the desk. I hadn’t noticed it before. Perhaps it hadn’t been there until this moment.
I opened it.
Inside, a comms interface.
Old, worn, the tendrils of its connections limp where they spilled like insect guts from the interior.
The dark of arcspace lingered on it, a familiar taste just on the tip of my tongue, a warm, welcoming coolness in my fingers, a smell like home.
I picked it up, turned it over in my hands, as I had done many times before, laid it back down on the desk. Said: “A Tryphon interface. How?”
“I RECOVERED IT AS A PAIR FROM THE SHINE, MANY YEARS AGO. KEPT IT SAFE. SENT THE OTHER HALF OF IT TO ADJUMIR – TO GEbrE NETHYA CHATITHIMSKA BAJWAHRA. TE ALERTED THE ACCORD. I ALTERTED THE SHINE.”
“Why?”
“TO SET A TRAP.”
“I don’t understand.”
“YOU ARE THE GHOST OF HASHA-TO. THE UNIONISTS OF THE SHINE ARE GROWING IN POWER, BUT THEY ARE NOT FEARED. THE SHINE FEARS YOU. IS FASCINATED BY YOU. THEODOSIUS RHODE IS FASCINATED BY YOU. A MONSTER Hé CANNOT KILL. A CREATURE OF THE DARK. FEAR MAKES THEM PREDICTABLE. THEY WOULD IMAGINE THAT THROUGH THIS INTERFACE YOU COULD ACCESS THEIR SYSTEMS, FIND THEIR SHIPS, REVEAL THEIR ENTIRE NETWORK TO THEIR ENEMIES. THEY NEEDED TO BELIEVE IT WAS POSSIBLE.”
“I couldn’t do any of it. There was too much noise, too much madness. It didn’t work.”
“THE INTERFACE WAS NOT THE TRAP. YOU WERE THE TRAP.”
“Explain.”
“YOUR EFFORTS TO ACCESS THEIR COMMS THROUGH THE TRYPHON INDUCED THE SHINE TO ISSUE AN ENTIRELY NEW BLACKSHIP COMMS PROTOCOL. OLD SYSTEMS WERE RETIRED. NEW SYSTEMS INSTALLED. STEPS TAKEN TO KEEP YOU FROM PENETRATING THEIR COMMUNICATIONS. YOU HAVE MET THE ENGINEERS INVOLVED – VALANS COLAN RENGABE AND RIV FEXRI. HE SERVES THE SHINE. SHE DOES NOT.”
I have often struggled with hospitality customs.
There is nothing strange about hospitality – most species that have made it past the hitting-nuts-with-rocks stage have a degree of social bonding and integration; it is how they survive.
Indeed, the necessity of social bonding is so strong that to not understand the local rules of hospitality is an immediate warning sign, a marker of otherness, of danger, of threat.
Did you touch your bowl with your right hand?
Did you mention politics before dessert, pass the nectar to the left, look an elder in the eye or not look an elder in the eye, agree when you should have been arguing, laugh when you should have been sad?
Alien, alien, threat, threat! You try so hard, but you are doing it wrong.
You are doing it wrong.
You are doing it wrong.
No one has explained how to do it right – you’re meant to just know, to understand this thing, this important, vital, obvious thing. But you’re doing it wrong.
You are doing it wrong.
And no one will ever love you while you are doing it wrong.
Of the two engineers who worked on the replacement for the Tryphon interface, it was Riv Fexri who was the traitor.
Her parents knew about Glastya Row, whispered the name of Sarifi im-Yyahwa long after the woman was dead. They told their daughter about the binary suns, about the end of the world, about what it meant to fight to stay alive.
Riv Fexri was a very serious child, as you would be when you carried the weight of the world on your back.
When she was nine, her parents’ unorthodox inclinations were exposed. Nothing could be immediately proven by Corpsec, so they weren’t simply arrested. Rather, they were promoted sideways – she into a job that was meant for two, he into a job destined for failure.
She was injured first, which meant she couldn’t work.
He was then let go, for his failure to do the impossible.
They were put in remedial measures, given food and shelter, their debts rising with every mouthful, every night of sleep.
If the parents – when the parents – could not pay it, that debt was put onto the child, and it was obvious where that particular tale was going.
Restitution would be through indenture, first of the parents, then the daughter.
These things were far more reasonable than disappearing the family overnight – their collapse into servitude was languid enough that people who might have been outraged simply shrugged their shoulders and said well well.
Well well.
Such a shame.
In the end, Riv’s parents abandoned her, fled into the drylands and quickly died.
Abandoning her was the merciful thing to do.
Though Riv would continue to accumulate debt through her placement into the Halsect orphanage, the debts of her parents would no longer keep piling on her too, and thus she would only have to work sixteen years to clear her dues before she could seek employment elsewhere.
Of course, as a nine-year-old, you don’t see it that way.
All you know is that your parents have left you.
That they didn’t stay to fight for you.
That you are alone, and unworthy of love.
It was in the orphanage that the Consensus first noticed her.
The Consensus was banned on all Shine planets, high-level employees regularly screened for signs of neurological activity indicative of a hive-bond.
This did not stop them having people in places where the unconditional love of the many might serve the few, working as the lowest of the Shine in hospitals, schools, care homes for the dispossessed and the very few shelters that the Ventures permitted to stand, in those areas where it was marginally cheaper to house the homeless than let them die messily in the streets.
The Consensus almost never recruited from the orphanage, and never recruited children.
The love they gave was of a quiet normalcy, of soft words and soothed dreams in the storm-shuddering night – not the all-encompassing, unconditional embrace of the many-who-are-one.
Quite why they made an exception for Riv Fexri, I will never know.
Perhaps even then they had a plan.
First they joined her into the two-as-one, letting her see into the mind of one who saw her, and who thought her beautiful, and worthy of love, and worthy of being known.
Then, once she had recovered from the shock of seeing herself through another’s eyes, of seeing that she too had value and her life could hold some meaning, they let her into the eight-as-one, the little network of Consensus minds living within the city.
There she saw how some things she had taken to be true – the rules of society, the customs of the day, the things you say yes to, no to – were in the eyes of others strange, different, unknown.
This was the last stage of becoming, before she was welcomed into that final mind, into the mind that waited just beyond the firm mental walls the eight-as-one kept between their newest member and the Consensus as a whole.
She prepared for the joining for four years, growing comfortable with this new kind of being, before at last she was ready.
Then the Consensus let her in, and she let them in too.
Their presence was not a flood, not a storm.
Rather, it was the washing-in of sensation.
A question half wondered, to which the answer would come – impossibly, unknowably – to you half a day later.
Knowledge, emotion, ideas, identity all drifted and blurred across the galaxy at that timeless speed of a semi-waking dream.
Riv knew what it was to walk upon another world, but it was never her memory, never her truth, merely a thing half seen, half felt in a sleeping state, glorious and alien and true.
She tasted kol, wept for Adjumir, went to sleep on a slowship and woke beneath another sun.
When members of the Consensus died in their sleep, the letting-go of life was a soft exhalation breathed across the galaxy; when they died in violence, the grief and pain hit as a little gasp, rippling out from that place where life was snuffed in a wave of knowing as tiny as an insect bite, as hot as poison.
But in all this, she was still herself.
Her memories, her life did not cease to be simply because she now knew the lives of others. Rather, they shone more brightly for being honestly perceived, for having the eyes of millions upon her whispering, We see you, we love you, we know your truth.
The Consensus was a creature of love.
Sometimes that love was destruction.
Her apprenticeship had been in a Halsect nutrition plant.
After two years, she was moved to communications, buoyed up by the knowledge of a million other minds slipping softly through hers.
After another nine months, Phonh-Ten bought out her debt from Halsect and moved her over to arcspace comms, apprenticing under Valans himself.
When she was sent for her first neurological scan, to check for signs of Consensus infiltration, she was not afraid.
The Consensus had a plan, and the examiner set to study her brain had been co-opted two years prior, his loyalty already bought.
When it was announced that a Tryphon interface had been lost and then found – found by an enemy no less, by the ghost of Hasha-to – Riv Fexri and Valans Clonas Rengabe were the obvious pairing to implement the more secure Mark 2 Titan interface that would lock the ghost out for ever.
Valans had, after all, designed the Tryphon; his expertise was the heart of the programme.
He was also a suspicious, overbearing type, constantly studying Riv’s work and calling her out for every tiny mistake.
If she was to have true, unfettered control over the project’s implementation and design, he would have to be removed.
Thankfully, Valans was always looking for a quick and easy way to make good Shine.
When the Unionists approached him, offered to return the stolen Tryphon interface during negotiations at the Spindle, he jumped at the chance of a seemingly easy win to impress his superiors with his get-up-and-go.
Not that it turned out that way. In the eyes of his superiors, he had been a fool, striking bargains with rebels – worse, so much worse, with the ghost of Hasha-to – and when Riv reported his suspicious activities on that station, well…
the Titan was too important to have someone that unreliable working on the project.
Thus Riv was promoted into the space that Valans left behind, and the roll-out of the Titan proceeded unimpaired.
This time, she assured her masters, even if an enemy agent got hold of the interface, no Pilot, no matter how determined, would be able to access comms. The Titan was biologically unimpeachable, passing every test they could throw at it, and Management was impressed.
So impressed, in fact, that they didn’t look that closely to see whether it was also fundamentally compromised on a mechanical rather than organic level, letting in not the ghost of Hasha-to, but Hulder and the quans.