Fassin looked up at the ape-thing sitting a few steps away. Quercer Janath had taken over full control of the Protreptic, cutting off the ship’s own computer and the software running within it from the vessel’s subsystems.
“What do you think I am, then?” Fassin asked. “What do you think the little ape in his armour sitting behind us is?”
“I don’t know,” the old man confessed. “Are you other dead ships?”
Fassin shook his head. “No.”
“Then perhaps you are representations of those in charge of the substrate I am now running on. You may want to quiz me on my actions while I was the ship.”
“You know, you seem alive to me,” Fassin said. “Are you sure you might not be alive and sentient now, now that you’re not connected to the ship?”
“Of course not!” the old man said scornfully. “I am able to give the appearance of life without being alive. It is not especially difficult.”
“How do you do this?”
“By being able to access my memories, by having trillions of facts and works and books and recordings and sentences and words and definitions at my disposal.” The old man looked at the ends of his fingers. “I am the sum of all my memories, plus the application of certain rules from a substantial command-set. I am blessed with the ability to think extremely quickly, so I am able to listen to what you, as a conscious, sentient being, are saying and then respond in a way that makes sense to you, answering your questions, following your meaning, anticipating your thoughts.
“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.”