Jaal had been born with a face that looked — she said herself — committee design: unharmonious, stuck together, nothing quite matching. Yet to almost everybody who had ever met her, she seemed outrageously attractive, thanks to some alchemy of physiognomy, personality and expression. Fassin’s private estimation was that Jaal’s was a face still waiting to be grown into, and that she would be more beautiful when she was middle-aged than she was now. It was one reason he had asked her to marry him.
They could look forward, Fassin had every reason to believe, to a long life together, and just as it had been sensible to marry within his profession — and to make a match that would meet with the enthusiastic approval of their respective Septs, strengthening the bonds between two of the most important Seer houses — so it had been only prudent to take that likely longevity into account.
Of course, as Slow Seers Fassin and Jaal’s shared future would be absolutely if not relatively longer than that of most of their contemporaries, and radically different; in the slow-time of a long delve, Seers aged very slowly indeed, and Uncle Slovius’s fourteen centuries, while short of the record and not yet (thankfully, naturally) his limit, should not be difficult to surpass. Seer spouses and loved ones had to schedule their slow-time and normal life carefully so as not to get too out of synch with each other, lest the protagonists lose touch emotionally. The life of Tchayan Olmey, Fassin’s old mentor and tutor, had hinged on just such an unforeseen discontinuity, leaving her stranded from an old love. “Anything wrong?” Jaal asked him.
“Just this, ah, interview thing.” He glanced at the antique clock across the room. “Who’s it with?”
“Can’t say,” he told her. He’d mentioned having an appointment for an interview later when he’d first met Jaal off her suborb shuttle at the house port in the valley below, but she’d been too busy telling him about the latest gossip from the capital and the scandal regarding her Aunt Feem and the Sept Khustrial boy to question him any further on the matter. Her shower, their supper and then more urgent matters had taken precedence thereafter.
“You can’t say?” she said, frowning, turning further round towards him, lifting and repositioning one dark breast on his light brown chest as she did so. There was something, he thought, not for the first time, about an aureola more pale than its surroundings… “Oh, Fass,” Jaal said, sounding annoyed, “it’s not a girl, is it? Not a servant girl? Fucking forfend, not before we’re married, surely?”
She was smiling. He grinned back. “Nuisance, but has to be done. Sorry.”
“You really can’t say?” She shifted her head, and blonde hair spilled over his shoulder. It felt even better than it looked.
“Really,” he said.
Jaal was staring intently at his mouth. “Really?” she asked.
“Well.” He licked his teeth. “I can say it’s not a girl.” She was still staring intently at his mouth. “Look, Jaal, have I got some sort of foreign matter lodged in there?”
She pushed her mouth slowly up towards his. “Not,” she said, “yet.”
“You are Fassin Taak, of the Seer Sept Bantrabal, ’glantine moon, Nasqueron gas-giant planet, Ulubis star and system?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You are physically present here and not any sort of projection or other kind of representation?”
“Correct.”
“You are still an active Slow Seer, domiciled in the seasonal houses of Sept Bantrabal and working from the satellite-moon Third Fury?”
“Yes, yes and yes.”
“Good. Fassin Taak, everything that will pass between you and this construct is in strictest confidence. You will respect that confidence and communicate to others no more of what we shall talk about than is absolutely necessary to facilitate such conduct as will be required of you in furtherance of whatever actions you will be asked to perform and whatever goals you will be asked to pursue. Do you do understand that and agree?”
Fassin thought about this. Just for an instant as the projection had started talking it had suddenly occurred to him that the glowing orb looked a lot like a Plasmatic being (not that he’d ever met one, but he’d seen images), and that moment of distraction had been sufficient for him to miss the full meaning of what had been said. “Actually, no. Sorry, I’m not trying to be—”
“To repeat…”
Fassin was in the main audience chamber at the top of the Autumn House, a large circular space with views in every horizontal direction and a dramatic transparent roof, all blanked out. For now its contents consisted of a single seat for him and a stubby, metallic-looking cylinder supporting a globe of glowing gas hovering above its centre. A fat cable ran from the squat cylinder to a floor flap in the middle of the chamber.
The gas sphere repeated what it had just said. It spoke more slowly this time, though happily with no trace of irritation or condescension. Its voice was flat, unaccented, and yet still seemed to contain the hint of a personality, as though the voice of a particular individual had been sampled and used as a template, from which most but not all expression had been removed.
Fassin heard it out, then said, “Okay, yes, I understand and agree.”
“Good. This construct is an emissarial projection of the Mercatorial Administrata, sub-Ministerial level, with superior-rank authority courtesy of the Ascendancy, Engineer division, Senior Engineer level, Eship Est-taun Zhiffir, portal-carrying. It is qualified to appear sentient while not in fact being so. Do you understand this?”
Fassin thought about this too and decided that he did, just. “Yep,” he said, then wondered if the projection would understand colloquial affirmatives. Apparently it did.
“Good. Seer Fassin Taak, you are hereby seconded to the Shrievalty Ocula. You will have the honorary rank—”
“Hold on!” Fassin nearly jumped out of his seat. “The what?”
“The honorary rank of—”
“No, I mean I’m seconded to the what?”
“The Shrievalty Ocula. You will have the honorary—”
“The Shrievalty?” Fassin said, trying to control his voice. “The Ocula?”
“Correct.”
The baroque, intentionally labyrinthine power structures of the latest, Culmina-inspired Age, incorporating the aspirations of and enforced limitations on at least eight major subject species and whole vast subcategories of additional Faring races as well as (by its own claim) “contextualising’ various lesser civilisations of widely varying scope and ambitions and, peripherally at least, influencing entire alien spectra of Others, held many organisations and institutions whose names the utterance of which people — or at least people who knew of such things — tended to greet with a degree of respect shading into fear.
The Shrievalty was probably the least extreme example; people might respect it — many would even find its purpose rather boring — but few would fear it. It was the paramilitary Order\discipline\faculty of technicians and theorists in charge of what had once been called Information Technology, and so it was also, though less exclusively, concerned with the acceptably restricted remnants of Artificial Intelligence technologies still extant in the post-War epoch.
The Machine War had wiped the vast majority of AIs out of existence throughout the galaxy over seven thousand years ago, and the Culmina-inspired — and enforced — peace which followed had stabilised around a regime which both forbade research into AI tech and demanded the active help of all citizens in hunting down and destroying what few scattered vestiges of AI might still exist. Organised on military lines with a bracing infrastructure of religious dogma, the Shrievalty was charged with the running, administration and maintenance of those IT systems which were anywhere near being sufficiently complex to be in danger of becoming sentient, either through accident or design, but which were considered too vital to the running of their various dependent societies to be shut down and dismantled.