“Thank you. So…”
“You will recall I said I wouldn’t go looking for QiRia unless it was something really important. Are you — they — deeming this to be?”
“Let’s say suggesting rather than deeming. But tell me: what are your feelings?”
“Mixed. I dare say I’ll do it, but I’m not terribly happy about it.”
Tefwe had never liked the idea of being fully downloaded into something remote who got to play at being you — who thought they were you. You stayed who you were but then the remote “you” became somebody different, over time. The two of you — or more — could be re-integrated, but it was, she thought, an intrinsically messy process of frankly dubious morality.
“Thank you,” the YC said, exhibiting relief. “May I transmit your mind-state now? There are various craft dotted throughout the galaxy, charged up, ready to roll. Rude to keep them waiting.”
“I want to be kept informed about what the remotes get up to,” she told it. Tefwe had been around Contact’s less salubrious outskirts in one form or another for so long she could remember when there hadn’t been anything called Special Circumstances, just a bunch of ships and others that acted like it, so she knew how to negotiate an agreement with a Mind acting as control such that she wouldn’t end up kicking herself.
“Agreed.”
“In full.”
“Agreed.”
“And a no-constraints chance to negotiate over subsequent re-integration, just me and it, or them.”
“Also agreed.”
“You’ll let me know which ship?”
“Of course.”
“Hmm.” Tefwe sat back, thought. “All right,” she said. “I agree.”
“Done. Once again, thank you. Where do you want to head for?”
“Dibaldipen Orbital, Angemar’s Prime system.”
The YC looked blank for a moment, then said, “Ah, one of ours. We might be able to work through the O Hub. That’d be even quicker. We’ll see. Hub Minds can be reluctant to indulge this sort of thing without demanding to know everything there is to know. Do we have a full name for the guy? First thing a Hub Mind’s going to ask for.”
Tefwe smiled. “He’s so old full names hadn’t been invented when he was born, but if they had been he’d have been Tursensa Ngaroe Hgan QiRia dam Yutton. And he has used that name in the past. The far past.”
“Thank you. In any event, the nearest ship is an ex-Psychopath VFP. The Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process. Just a few days away.” YC looked puzzled. “Dibaldipen. That’s where QiRia is?”
“I have no idea. But there’s a drone there that ought to know.”
“You think it’ll still be there?” YC asked, sounding a little sceptical. “It has been four hundred years.”
“It is retired and set in its ways. Gone native and to seed. I suspect it’ll be there.”
“So, if you’re really so old, tell me what you’ve learned over the years, over the millennia. What are the fruits of your wisdom?”
“They are remarkably few. I have managed to avoid learning too many lessons. That may be what keeps me alive.”
Cossont lay on her bed; the grey cube with QiRia’s mind-state inside it sat on a bedside shelf. It was only the second time she’d turned the cube on since returning home. She, the volupt and the elevenstring had just moved out of her mother’s house in M’yon into a place of her own, half the world away; she was starting to make new friends but struggling to get worthwhile gigs and maybe she was feeling lonely.
“So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”
“True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”
“But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”
“No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.” The voice from the grey cube paused, then said, “Although… I think living so long might have persuaded me that I am not quite as pleasant a person as I once thought I was.”
Cossont, presented with two opportunities to be scathing just in these last few sentences, was aware she was choosing to take neither. She confined herself to, “Really?” said in a slightly sarcastic tone.
“Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Is this a rhetorical question?”
“It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”
“The poor, deluded, fools.”
“I suspect, from your phrasing and your tone of voice, that, as a little earlier, you think you are being sarcastic. Well, no matter. However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair.”
“What’s that?”
“A kind of glee. Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever — if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead — then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind. It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.”
“Not necessarily the most compassionate response.”
“Indeed not. But my point is that it might be the only one that lets you cope with great age without becoming a devout hermit, and therefore represents a kind of filter favouring misanthropy. Nice people who are beginning to live to a great age — as it were — react with such revulsion to the burgeoning horrors that confront them, they generally prefer suicide. It’s only us slightly malevolent types who are able to survive that realisation and find a kind of pleasure — or at least satisfaction — in watching how the latest generation or most recently evolved species can re-discover and beat out afresh the paths to disaster, ignominy and shame we had naively assumed might have become hopelessly over-grown.”
“So basically you’re sticking around to watch us all fuck up?”
“Yes. It’s one of life’s few guaranteed constants.”
Cossont thought about this. “If that’s true, it’s a bit sad.”
“Tough. Life is sometimes.”
“And you’re right: it doesn’t exactly show you in the best light.”
“You’re supposed to admire me for my honesty.”
“Am I?” she said, and reached over and turned the grey cube off.
That was when she decided she’d give the cube to somebody else, who might want it, or at least agree to care for it.