Instead, because of the Subliming, she had been repaired bit by bit, detail by detail, almost cell by cell, leaving her body a patchwork of pre-existing normality and dazzlingly fresh new bits, so that she felt jangled, vibrating, bruised beyond belief yet with nothing to show for it, perpetually astounded at being suddenly not dead, not seriously injured to the point of near-death…
She had listened in, from her sickbed in a much smaller but still-well-equipped module, to the debriefing QiRia gave on being reunited with the memories stored in the recovered eyes.
“You are, perhaps, the only Gzilt who will ever hear this,” the avatar told her.
The ship had made a new avatar. It looked and talked like Berdle had, before it/he had changed to look more like a Gzilt male, the first time they had set foot on the Girdlecity together.
“Sure you should be telling me?” she asked, huskily. Even her throat and lower tongue had taken a puncture wound in that last fusillade of fire from the android Agansu.
“I think you earned it,” the ship told her. It had yet to give its new avatar a name. It wouldn’t use “Berdle” again; it was sort of a tradition, it said, that when you lost an avatar you gave the next one a different name.
“Huh,” was all she would say.
Pyan heard the secret about the Book of Truth too — Pyan, now forever wanting to be wrapped, whimpering and cooing annoyingly round her neck, consoling, seemingly genuinely, honestly concerned for her after so nearly losing her — but the ship, at Vyr’s request, made sure that what Pyan heard of this, Pyan forgot again.
She still hadn’t managed to lose the elevenstring, either. As part of her personal effects, the ship had thoughtfully transferred it to the smaller shuttle craft before slinging the larger one, the one she’d been staying in, alongside the Girdlecity, to distract the Churkun.
It was a relief, albeit a guilty one, that there wasn’t room to play it inside the smaller craft.
It still took up an awful lot of space.
xGSV Empiricist
oLOU Caconym
oGSV Contents May Differ
oGCU Displacement Activity
oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
oUe Mistake Not…
oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
oMSV Pressure Drop
oLSV You Call This Clean?
Fellows, colleagues, friends… We have our answer. It is much as we expected, though the import of even the most expected news changes when it becomes definite, and fact. The question is: what do we do? What do we say?
∞
xLOU Caconym
I’d tell them. I’d swamp their airways with it. I’d announce it so it’s the first thing the newly pre-woken hear. But I know we won’t. For what it’s worth, I’m resigned to the decision we’re all about to make, of keeping it quiet.
∞
xGSV Contents May Differ
The simulations have been exhaustive but inconclusive; the likelihood is that releasing the information would make little difference, but with the outside possibility that there might be chaos, a partial Subliming with a significant part of the Gzilt populace and AIs changing their minds, further dispute between the Scavengers, and possibly even between the non-Subliming part of the Gzilt and the Scavengers. The chance of things turning ugly is small, but not that small, and the ugly might be very big ugly.
∞
xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
We can’t tell them. Those that would most care already know, or guess. Those that might be most affected are those we have the least right to disturb.
∞
xMSV Pressure Drop
I can’t agree. The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t.
∞
xLSV You Call This Clean?
Technically I agree with that. In practice I agree we say and do nothing. The circumstances, due to the timing, are unique. Yes, you should always tell the truth, unless you find yourself in a situation where it would be utter moral folly to do so. At least now we know the truth. The fevered, speculative potential of it has collapsed to something definite, and not so terrible, after all. To tell it would not be the worst thing ever, either. And one should always tell the truth, unless… The point is that we are not automata; we have a choice. I say we exercise it wisely, and stay silent.
∞
xGSV Empiricist
So, shall we vote? And/or open it up to others so that more may vote?
∞
xUe Mistake Not…
If I might.
∞
xGSV Empiricist
Please.
∞
xUe Mistake Not…
We know how this works. If we do nothing then any disaster that befalls the Gzilt over the next few hours is entirely theirs. If we intervene we become at least complicit. This is a truth that has not been asked for; even the original bearers of it, the Z-R, made it clear they were happy it stay unknown. We know, and what we know is — now that we can be sure of what we know — that it is not our business. Whether the knowing was worth the price we and others have paid is another sort of moral equation, at right-angles to this one. I say we do nothing. Vote if you like.
∞
xLOU Caconym
Anybody wish to wrest from me my claim for precedence in the awkward customer/dissenting adult/outright contrarian stakes?… No? Thought not. Then when I say that I reluctantly agree with what our colleague the Mistake Not… has just said, I think we might consider the matter closed.
The Caconym, in the shape of its virtual avatoid, returned to the castle-made-of-castles it had modelled within the near-unending recesses of its computational matrices. Its humanoid shape set out from the gatehouse that was made of tens of thousands of already mighty gatehouses, and walked all the way to the high tower which sat like a fat flagpole on top of the great composite tower, many subjective kilometres away into the fractal architecture of the baroque edifice.
It had waited all this time to hear anything from the mind-state of the Zoologist — anything at all that might have helped it and its colleagues in their attempts to understand the workings of the Sublime — and, despite being tempted to do so many times, it had not come back here to attempt to force the pace or the issue.
Now that the matter in hand appeared to have been settled — without, it had to be said, any help from the Zoologist — it had something to report, and could release the soul of the other ship from whatever obligation to help that it might have felt under. Not that that appeared to be very much, given the continuing silence. At least the instances of weird, ambiguous intrusions into its substrates, maybe from the Sublimed realm, had tailed off to nothing recently. That was a good sign, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. It was starting to worry about that.