“However, all this is simply the result of programs — programs written by sentient beings — sifting through earlier examples of conversations and exchanges which I have stored within my memories and selecting those which seem most appropriate as templates. This process sounds mysterious but is merely complicated. It begins with something as simple as you saying ‘Hello’ and me replying ‘Hello’, or choosing something similar according to whatever else I might know about you, and extends to a reply as involved as, well, this one.”
The old man looked suddenly shocked, and disappeared again.
Fassin looked up at the ginger-haired ape. It sneezed and then had a coughing fit. “Nothing,” it said, “to do,” it continued, between coughs, “with me.”
On Fassin’s next visit, the far side of the great, slow river was like a mirror image of the side that he, the old man and the gangly ape were on. An ancient city of stone domes and spires all silent and dark and half-consumed by trees and creepers faced them, and a huge long temple, covered in statues and carvings of fabulous and unlikely beasts lay directly across from where they sat, its lower limits defined by dozens of big stone terraces and steps leading down to the sluggish, dark brown waters.
Fassin looked over, to see if the three of them were reflected there, but they weren’t. The far side was deserted.
“Did you hunt down and kill many AIs?” he asked.
The old man rolled his eyes. “Hundreds. Thousands.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Some of the AIs were twinned or in larger groupings. I took part in 872 missions.”
“Were any in gas-giants?” Fassin asked. He’d positioned himself so that he could see the ape in the dented armour. It looked at him when he asked this question, then looked away again. It was trying to knock the dents out of its breastplate with a small hammer. The dull chink-chink-chinks that the hammer made sounded dead and unechoing across the wide river.
“One mission took place partly within a gas-giant. It ended there. A small ship full of anathematics. We pursued them into the atmosphere of the gas-giant Dejiminid where they attempted to lose us within its fierce storm-winds. The Protreptic was more atmosphere-capable than their ship, and eventually, going to greater and greater depths in their desperation to shake us off, their vessel collapsed under the pressure and was crushed, taking all aboard into the liquid metal depths.”
“Were there no Dwellers present to complain about this?”
The old man looked inquiringly at him. “You are not really a Dweller, are you? It did occur to me that I might be running within a Dweller-controlled substrate.”
“No, I’m not a Dweller. I told you; I’m a human.”
“Well, the answer is they had not seen us enter their planet. They complained later. That was only the first of two occasions when the Protreptic was operationally active within a gas-giant. Usually our missions were all vacuum.”
“The other?”
“Not so long ago. Helping to pursue a large force of Beyonder ships in the vicinity of Zateki. We prevailed there, too.”
“What brought you to the Sepulcraft Rovruetz?” Fassin asked.
The flat and flattening chink-chink-chink noise stopped. The ginger-haired ape held its breastplate up to catch the light, scratched its chest, then went back to tapping with the hammer again.
“Do you represent a Lustral Investigation Board?” the old man asked. “Is that what you are, in reality?”
“No,” Fassin said. “I don’t.”
“Oh. Oh well. For the last two and a half centuries, uniform time,” the old man said, “we had been seeking information about the so-called Dweller List.” (The long-limbed ape laughed out loud at this, but the old man didn’t seem to notice.) “Much time was spent in the region of the Zateki system, investigating the Second Ship theory. Various secondary and tertiary missions resulted from information gleaned in the region. None ever bore fruit in the matter of the List, the Second Ship theory or the so-called Transform, though two AIs were tracked down and eliminated in the course of these sub-missions. We were summoned from the Rijom system and sent to the Direaliete system some five months ago, then laid an intercept course to the Sepulcraft Rovruetz. I was not told of the reasons for this course of action, the orders covering which were personal to Commander Inialcah and communicated to him beyond my senses.”
“Did you find out anything new about the List and the Transform?” Fassin asked.
“I think the only thing that we ever felt we had properly discovered, in the sense of adding something other than just an extra rumour to the web of myths and rumours that already existed regarding the whole subject was that — if there was any truth in the matter — the portals would be lying quiescent and perhaps disguised in the Kuiper belts or Oort clouds of the relevant systems, waiting on a coded radio or similar broadcast signal. That is what the so-called Transform would be: a signal, and the medium and frequency on which it was to be transmitted. This made sense in that all normally stable locations where portals might have been hidden successfully over the sort of time scales involved — Lagrange points and so on — were easy to check and eliminate.” The old man looked at Fassin quizzically again. “Are you another seeker after the truth of the List?”
“I was,” Fassin said.
“Ah!” The representation of the old man looked pleased for once. “And are you not dead, then, too?”
“No, I’m not dead, though I’ve given up looking, for the moment.”
“What was it that took you to the Sepulcraft Rovruetz?” the old man asked.
“I had what I thought was a lead, a clue, a way forward,” Fassin told him. “However, the creature who might have had the evidence had destroyed what he held and killed himself.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Yes, very.”
The old man looked up at the bronze-blue cloudless sky. Fassin followed his gaze, and as he did so, the old man disappeared.
There was something. Fassin sat, gascraft rammed into the extemporised couch in the Voehn ship’s command space by the continuing acceleration, watching the nearly static, rather boring view of dead ahead shown on the main screen, and he knew there was something that he was missing.
Something nagged at him, something bothered him, something half-came to him in moments of distraction or when he was dreaming, and then wriggled away again before he could catch it.
He didn’t sleep very much — only a couple of hours a day in all — though when he did there were usually dreams, as if his subconscious had to cram all his dreaming into the small amount of dream-space available. Once he was actually standing in a small stream, somewhere in the gardens of a great house he couldn’t see, trousers rolled up, trying to catch fish with his bare hands. The fish were his dreams, even though he was distantly aware at the time that this situation was itself a dream. When he tried to catch the fish — sinuous small presences darting like elongated teardrops of mercury round his feet — they kept flicking away and disappearing.
When he looked up, the stream was flowing through a large amphitheatre, and a great crowd of people were watching him intently.
At the transition point of the journey, where the Protreptic stopped accelerating, turned a half-somersault and pointed its engines at its destination to start deceleration, Quercer Janath spent some time checking that Y’sul was still healing satisfactorily.
Fassin used the time to explore a little more of the Voehn ship, floating the arrowhead gascraft down the narrow circular access tubes, investigating crew quarters, storerooms and chambers. Camera remotes tracked his every move, the thoroughly internally surveillanced ship making it simple for Quercer Janath to keep whatever fraction of an eye on him they thought appropriate.