“Indeed.”
“And still on Adjumir.”
“Yes.”
“So ter number was not called.”
“No. It was not.”
Gebre’s number was not called, therefore Gebre will die. That is the Adjumiri way of things.
“Does te want… rescuing?” The word felt strange, heavy around my lips. An implausible, impossible thing.
“Te did not mention anything of that nature, no.”
“Then why… then what?”
“Te has been project lead on the evacuation of objects of cultural and historical significance. There is evidence to suggest that te has come into possession of an item of vital significance not merely to Adjapar” – Hulder talked about the future planet of the Adjumiris as if it were already their home, as if their current world were already dead – “but to the Accord as a whole. Within our limited ability to confirm the find, we consider it significant. Te suggested you would be an appropriate courier.”
“Is that… is that all? You want me to go to Adjumir to pick up… what? An especially valuable pot? A magic mushroom? What?”
“Yes. That is what we want. But that is not why you will go.”
Hulder was designed to be beautiful, by the standards of the Xi.A face built to speak of strength, safety, security, even a kind of sensuousness, playing on the deepest, whispered parts of human psychology. I imagined qe was a very good liar, when qe needed to be. And of course, qe was right. It wasn’t even a question.
Of course I would go.
As I packed my bag, Rencki sat on the end of my bed, three red tails curled around four white paws, ears pricked up high and alert, and said: “Naturally I will be coming with you.”
As companions went, I had immediately preferred Rencki to Hadja. As well as a physical carapace designed for organic social cohesion, qe had also given over more processing capacity to social nuance, though qe grew snappy if qis batteries dipped below 20 per cent.
“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.
