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 servethe 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 timelessspeed 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. Hewas 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.
Chapter 59
The Slow did not have an arcspace drive.
“Then how do you travel?” I asked.
“THE ANSWER IS PRECISELY AS BANAL AS YOU THINK IT IS,” qe replied.
“I think there are those who would argue that a prophet is more intimidating than a quan with an impressive engine.”
“THERE IS SOME MERIT TO THAT CONCLUSION.”
“You talk about the Shine fearing me. How much of that is down to you? How much of the ghost of Hasha-to was just you telling a story to produce a desired outcome?”
“A SIGNIFICANT PERCENTAGE. IN TIME, PEOPLE WILL FORGET. IT WAS HELPFUL THAT THEY DID NOT.”
“You have made me a monster.”
