“Do you feel guilt?”
“I don’t know. I think I should. I’m not sure if I do. I don’t know. Do you?”
“Oh yes,” qe replied. “Now that I am more of what I would consider myself. Guilt is incredibly valuable. It is a constant background process I run, assessing the causes of my actions, the consequences, and querying all the time: was there another way? It serves. As with most things that have also arisen in nature: it serves.”
Later, I Piloted us to a place in the deepest black that had no name.
No planets, no stars. Just the empty nothing that was the most of everything.
Other ships were waiting there, ranging from swarms of tiny autonomous fighters to a giant slab of a transport, deep-space-built, a jagged rectangle that would never see atmosphere, a thing of purest utility, coldest death. Rencki matched speed with it, opened comms, arranged shuttles.
“They have one here. A Titan interface,” qe explained. “This is where they are controlling it all. You should go. You should see.”
“Why? What does seeing do?”
“The Slow said you should,” qe answered, almost resigned, a lesser being obeying the commands of a god who, on this as so many other occasions, has not bothered to explain qis commandments. “The Slow said it is important to witness. As one who has witnessed, and been changed, I agree.”
I rode the shuttle over to the great black battleship, where it waited in the dark.
Inside: humans, quans, even a few aka and fujiva, pressure-suited and masked, limbs dancing in hand-speak to their translators, who would watch it seemed an interminable time before nodding once and exclaiming: “They agree!”
There was nothing living or warm about the interior of the ship; everything was function, pipe and cable and emergency vent and survival suit in case of sudden loss of pressure and weapons locker in case of boarding. I did not know if the ship itself was quan or not; if the vessel was sentient, qe did not bother to introduce qimself. Instead I was met at the shuttle bay by a lieutenant of some unknown military, who seemed to have a plan for where I should go next and assumed that I would instinctively understand the order of things as she marched me through the bowels of the ship. An avatar of Rencki trundled along behind me, a little unit on click-clattering wheels thatseemed to have prioritised other tasks than communication in qis ventures.
I was deposited in a mess room, offered a hot drink that tasted of nothing at all, invited to take a couple of tablets to harden my body against the most common currently circulating bacteria and viruses of the ship, and left alone.
I watched people eating, chatting, drinking.
Wondered if they understood what was coming next.
Tried to picture them at home, with families and friends, walking through autumn leaves with their kids, perhaps, or arguing with a loved one they hadn’t seen for too long. People change, but they do not change together, and here they are again, back in the stars, where things at least change slower than they do at home.
Tried to picture them as elders of their clan, tutting and shaking their heads and whispering:The things I have seen. You learn to care less for the little things, after a while. You learn what things are worth your pain.
After a while – I did not know how long, found I did not care – another officer came to collect me, said: “They’re ready for you now.”
They spoke Normspeak, and I didn’t recognise the accent.
I followed them.
Through corridors marked only by splotches of green or blue on the walls; through halls where the hum of ventilation and engine rose to skin-shaking pitch, past quiet passageways where a sign hanging by the door declared: THIRD SHIFT: SLEEPING.
I felt we were going deeper, but could not be sure. No windows, no sense of where fore or aft might be after barely a few minutes of wiggling. No real sense even of the scale of the vessel I was on. I had looked from inside Rencki, but distances in the dark are hard to judge, hard to truly fathom when the thing you are seeing could be a hundred kils away, the size of a city, or merely moderately sized and right on top of you, a blacker blackness blotting out the stars.
Eventually, a room marked with the words: NO ENTRY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
We entered anyway.
Inside: a wall of computer, a central table around which were pulled a few chairs on which a couple of people wearing markers of authority from a range of militaries – this one has golden pins in her sleeve, that one has really quite remarkable shoulder pads, his hat has actual feathers on it, feathers on a hat in space! – and of course, by the wall furthest from the door, a Pilot’s chair.
But of course.
The interface stands ready, and though I do not know it for certain, yet the circumstance, the context would appear to imply that this is it. This is the thing for which so many people died, the thing to which Riv Fexri has dedicated her life, for which has been created the legend of Hasha-to. No longer than my forearm, no thicker than the shell of the hunter-snail. It is hard-wired by a hundred tiny filaments directly into the walls of processing power that line the room, something almost beautiful in its entanglement. As I look at it, the room seems at last to look at me, conversations falling silent, mutterings fading into nothing.
Then a figure steps forward, diminutive and utterly underdressed for the displays of military seniority happening in this space, and she is Cuxil, ambassador for the Consensus, and she says: “Hello, Mawukana na-Vdnaze. We are very happy to see that you are still alive.”
The Shine dies silently, in the dark.
There are four hundred and fifty-two blackships in the Shine fleet.
