“Correct,” qe replied, not bothering to twitch an ear or feign an indignant sniff in reply. “We have vital business and no one else will use them. It’s simply a question of overriding the vigil systems, something which – with a little time – I should be able to do.”
“How much time?”
“I am sure it will be momentary.”
It was not momentary.
The sun rose higher, the heat thickened the air to an insect-humming soup, the shadows near-black in contrast to the blazing light of day. I sweated and sweltered beneath the sagging branches of a thick-leafed, thin-trunked tree, while Rencki sat on qis haunches in absolute silence, staring at the sealed vigil house as if by glare alone qe could crack it.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“It will go faster if you do not constantly demand my attention,” qe retorted in sharp Xiha, and I clicked my tongue and raised my hands, melding three entirely separate languages into one meek conciliation, while the quanmech continued bouncing code against the silent house before us.
Some time later:
“How’s it going now?”
“I am making progress!”
“System a bit tougher than expected?”
“I am a sentient quan of extraordinary capacity; it is merely an adaptive algorithm!”
“But, and I may have missed something here, it is an adaptive algorithm dedicated to a single process – keeping sentients like you from accessing the system. Whereas you, being so diverse in all things, must dedicate processing power to movement and speech and social niceties and defensive capabilities and sensory processing and—”
“You are not helping!”
“I’m just saying. You predicted an easy hack, and instead—”
A polite clicking from across the street.
Rencki’s head snapped round, tails coming to attention – qe truly must have been immersed to be caught so off-guard by another’s presence. “Yes?” qe snapped, qis accent briefly defaulting back to Assembly Adjumiri, to the standard vocabulary and style that would have come with the basic upload, rather than the more nuanced, organic-sounding Adjumiri of the local area. “What do you want?”
The person watching us wore a sleeveless vest with a single white feather hanging from the lower hem, symbolising what I could not say. His sandy-red hair was pushed back from a high forehead and he had a bag at his feet, bulging from every part. Behind him was a child. I found it hard to guess their age in Adjumiri terms, but imagined they were barely five or six Normyears old, their hair braided tight to their skull, a matching, far smaller bag at their feet.
“You seem to be trying to hack the vigil house,” said the man, without judgement or rancour. “Are you looking for a vehicle?”
“We are trying to get to Kiskol,” Rencki replied, and qe had reassigned processing priorities, because qis voice was back to the local accent, flowing softer, as if you could hear the friendly smile in qis speech. “We are following a calling for the Assembly. The vigil house was a necessity of last resort.”
“Kiskol,” mused the man. “I may be able to help with that.”
He said his name was Ranwha, and the child Zanlan.
They had come from the south – he did not seem to feel the need to say more than “south” – and were heading to Elevator 15.
“Kiskol isn’t far out of the way,” he declared. “And we’ve been stopping to pick up supplies as we go.”
“If you have a vehicle,” Rencki said, “you would be doing us an incredible service.”
From behind Ranwha’s legs, Zanlan watched with eyes narrowed, fingers clenched into tight little fists. Rencki clicked an acknowledgement, then turned qis big yellow eyes towards the child.
Then, qe sniffed.
Qe raised qis big black nose and sniffed the air, then dropped, snuffled along the ground, turned in a little circle, sniffed again, and by sniffing appeared, for the first time, to discover the existence of Zanlan. Slowly, as if the little red fox were more afraid of them than they were of qim, qe approached, ears rotating back and forward on qis skull, until qe was a hand’s-reach from Zanlan. Then qe produced an extraordinary wet, gloopy sound that was entirely generated from qis vocal driver rather than the chemical mesh on the end of qis nose.
Children, no matter where you go, always seem to enjoy the slightly grotesque, and despite themselves, Zanlan giggled.
Rencki appeared outraged by this, leaped back nearly a metric through the air, landing on all fours with fur raised, scampered round behind my legs to peer out at the child as if threatened by a gun, then slowly edged forward again, creeping as if qe could not be seen.
