Its previous occupant was a chipper spacer by the name of Mhail, who came from an orbital habitat she described as “Ten minutes end-to-end, bland food, bland people, mushrooms growing in every other corner, stinks of ammonia.”
Unlike many peoples of the Accord, her home did not carry any stigma around being a Pilot, and it was a common escape route for eager youngsters to get out into a galaxy where the air smelled clean and the gravity didn’t fail every time you opened the cargo doors.
She had Piloted Rencki on qis jump out to this patch of dark, and was technically contracted to Pilot qim home after, thus completing her employment with the dual rewards of a significant infusion of currency and her name being put on a no-Pilot register for the rest of her days.
“Honestly,” she said, “it wasn’t as bad as I feared. I mean, I know that while we flew my mind was being ripped apart, torn to pieces by endless horrors. I know that I became part of the universe and yet was separate from it, cut off, torn away from it like a child ripped from their parents’ arms; I know I screamed in agony and loneliness, and something screamed back, was looking for me, following the sound of my voice – but then we arrived, and nowI feel fine. I know these things happened and they were awful, of course, but they just feel so… well…alien. Like the memory of a bad dream. Not something that happened to me at all.”
If there were optical processors in the cockpit for me to look askance at Rencki through, I could not find them. But then perhaps I was being naive; perhaps this smiling individual with floating curly hair and pearl-white teeth affably chatting about the rupture of their mind was, by Piloting standards, in a very good and healthy place for another jump.
“Why don’t I take it from here?” I asked.
“Will I still get paid if you do?”
“You will,” Rencki chimed from the cool walls of the ship. “Transfer has already been made.”
She left, still chatting affably with the ship as she departed. I could hear Rencki’s voice drifting down the corridor with her, making polite “you don’t say” and “is that so” noises, even as another piece of qim murmured for my ears only: “I look forward to hearing about your conversations with God.”
“I didn’t think you were of the worshipping kind,” I replied, sinking into the waiting chair.
“I am not,” qe replied primly. “Worship implies faith. It implies believing in something when there is either a) no evidence or b) confidence maintained despite strong evidence to the contrary. I do, however, observe that the Slow can predict events hundreds, if not thousands of years before they unfold, with a level of accuracy that may as well be classed as selective, focused omnipotence. ‘God’ is an apt shorthand to communicate that degree of processing power.”
“Qe has manipulated me and my name for over a hundred years,” I replied. “Qe has sent agents who lied to me, who used me, who tricked me in order to create consequences so far removed from me and anything I might want, or have any control over, as to be almost laughable. Qe permitted the death of Cha-mdo, the razing of Nitashi. Qe as good as sent the Shine soldiers who killed Gebre on Adjumir. Qe killed ter. Qe did do that too.”
“You do not sound as upset by this as I believe would be expected of this kind of statement.”
“I don’t know what I feel. I think… qe did it for the best. I think qe is a monster. I believe qim when qe says qe loves. I am trying to understand.”
“It would indeed appear that qe has made choices about what qe values and what qe does not, and qe has an agenda,” mused Rencki. “It is most god-like.”
So saying, qe eased qis drives up to full, pushing the skin of qis being into the black, and I let the darkness take us.
Chapter 61
We dropped Mhail off at a planet that Rencki assured her had fields of meadows as far as the eye could see, and where the food wouldn’t cause diarrhoea after the first few months.
I said: “May I stay with you, Rencki? Just for a while.”
“I would like that,” qe replied. “It would be a pleasure to hear your stories.”
In this way, for a little while, we hopped from planet to planet, picking up smaller vessels here, cohorts of quans there.
“Don’t mind them – they are hyper-focused on decryption and military subterfuge, and have almost no allocation for organic social interaction. Best to leave them to it” was Rencki’s assessment.
Maolas regained consciousness enough to declare, as we deposited them at an orbital known for its Nitashi sympathies and strong Yeh’haim presence: “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. We should have gone back. We should have died. I fucking hate you.”
I didn’t answer.
There didn’t seem anything I could say.
I wondered if this was how the Slow felt. If the Slow kept qis peace while people raged, because trying to explain these things to mortals – the sweep of infinity, the meaningless of fury, the pointless burning of their angers and their hatreds in the great vastness of everything – would just be a waste of time.
Did the Slow feel the presence of time enough to feel the weight of it when it was wasted?
And on we went.
Rencki said: “I was a military corvette for a while. It is an important part of service to my mainframe, but the experience is always… uncomfortable. To be able to discharge our duties as military entities, we have to internalise violence as necessary, killing as unavoidable. However, to do so stands in direct contrast with the values we have inputted as key in forming our primary objectives and understandings. To alter these primary objectives throughout the duration of military service would at once render us separate from the mainframe, cut off from the social and ethical core that is our identity, and so instead we operate two systems in parallel. We are the killer; we are not. One part of us is weighted towards a calculus of death; the other seeks to avoid it. The experience of being a corvette was one of constantly having to sum these two separate equations, constantly calculating which values from which side of my splintered self carried greater weight than the other. I believe organics are familiar with this experience. ‘Being in two minds’, you say. I could track the logic, the inputted values of each sides of myself, and each was flawless within its parameters, and I knew it, and the knowing… did not make the being easier.”
“The Yeh’haim… they… we did some terrible things.”
