“Probably,” Berdle agreed.
Cossont sighed. “If this all goes horribly wrong, you’ll have to contact my mother to tell her you’ve lost her little girl.”
“If this all goes horribly wrong,” the ship told her, “I too might be lost.”
“Well, you’ve heard what she’s like; death might be preferable.”
“That,” Pyan said primly, “is no way to talk about your mother.”
Cossont looked at Berdle and said reasonably, “That, I think you’ll find, is the only way to talk about my mother.”
“These things accrete.”
“Most things accrete that don’t gradually crumble, rust or evaporate.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest there was any merit in the process.”
“Indeed. Nor in its opposite.”
“I’m glad we have finally found something to agree on.”
“I’m not.”
“I think you make a virtue of contrariness, or think to.”
“You might be dismayed to know just how little what you think matters to me, Scoaliera.”
“I doubt it. My expectations could hardly be lower. Also, I’m encouraged by your relative approachability and good humour on this occasion.”
“I do believe my sarcasm-meter just twitched.”
“A false positive, I fear. I was being entirely sincere.”
“You say? Have I been imagining that I was the very exemplar of hearty, helpful bonhomie on our last meeting?”
“Possibly.”
“Hmm.”
The drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie was the size and shape of a large grey suitcase. A rather battered and dusty large grey suitcase. Its scraped, slightly dented casing glinted in the sunlight where it had been polished by the sand in the wind, or had been scraped against stones. If it was showing an aura field, it was being washed out by the brilliant sunlight. But probably it wasn’t; it never had in the past, not as long as Tefwe had known it.
“Anyway, I am not persuaded that memories do only accrete,” the drone told the woman. “Even without the intrinsic limitations of a conventional biological brain, what one forgets can be as important and as formative as what one remembers.”
Hassipura had made its home in a tall, jagged outcrop of dark rocks that stuck out above the white waste of the salt desert like a diseased tooth. Through the machine’s efforts over the centuries, the place had become a dry little paradise of directed cause and effect, an oasis of minutely ordered motion and an arid image of a water garden.
“I thought drones, like Minds, remembered everything,” Tefwe said.
“Well, we don’t.” There was a pause before it said, “Well, I don’t.”
Tefwe and the drone were at the foot of the outcrop, just a vertical metre and a few shattered-looking boulders away from the surface of the desert. Tefwe was standing and Hassipura was hovering level with the woman’s head, performing some maintenance on a fragile-looking raising screw. The raising screw was powered by the fierce sunlight falling on a small semi-circular array of solar panels part-encasing its lower quarter.
“I see,” the woman said. “Do you choose what to forget, or do you just let things disappear randomly?”
“Scoaliera,” the drone said, “if I chose what to forget, I would very likely have forgotten all about you.”
The screw, one of a dozen or so at this lowest level of the rocks, was a couple of metres tall, and thin enough for Tefwe’s fingers to have met, had she grasped it one-handed. The foot of the device lay in a pool of sand about a metre across; the slowly rotating screw twisted lazily in the dark-gold grains, raising them inside a transparent collar with a hypnotic steadiness to deposit the lifted material, a minute or so later, into another pool on a higher tier of the outcrop, where a second level of raising screws and sand-wheels like pieces of giant clockwork would transport the material further up, and so on, for level after level and diminishing tier after diminishing tier until a single last raising screw, buried in a tunnel inside the dusty peak of the tor, deposited a small trickle of sand to an overflowing pool at its very summit.
“That is ungallant, and, I suspect, also not true.”
“Let us test that, shall we, should you ever come to visit me again?”
“I don’t believe you delete memories at random.”
“They are chosen at random and buffer-binned; whether they are finally deleted is a matter of choice.”
“Ah. Might have thought so.”
The drone had subtly sculpted the outcrop over the decades and centuries it had lived here, cutting channels, pools, cisterns, tunnels and reservoirs into the rock, building structures that at least resembled aqueducts and creating, had the whole complex been filled with water, what would have been a kind of secret water garden, albeit with rather steeply inclined canals and aqueducts.
But the outcrop held no water at all. Instead it was sand that moved within the tunnels and channels, sand which was lifted within the raising wheels and screws, and sand which fell in little whispering falls and moved liquidly down dry weirs.
“Whatever makes you think I’d wish to visit you again after being so roundly insulted?”
“That fact that I have insulted you just as roundly in the past to so little effect,” the drone said smoothly, “for here you are. Again.”
“You’re right. I ought to come back just to annoy you,” Tefwe said, squatting. She dipped her hand into the shaded pool where the rod of the raising screw slanted into the tawny grains. She let the sand fall back between her fingers; it slipped away almost as quickly as water would have. “It moves very smoothly,” she said, inspecting her hand. A few tiny grains adhered to her skin, all in the lines of her palm.
“Please don’t do that,” the drone said, using invisible maniple fields to adjust parts of the diamond-sheet-covered solar panels.
“Why?” Tefwe asked.
“Moisture,” Hassipura said. “And impurities such as salts. Your hands will have added a little of each to the sands.”
“Sorry.” Tefwe squatted and stuck her head down into the shade created by the solar panel, gazing at the pool of sand underneath. Inside its transparent sleeve, the turning screw seemed barely to disturb the surface of the sand, which appeared to flow in to fill even the slightest of hollows. She glanced up to see if the drone was looking, reckoned it couldn’t see, then stuck a finger into the surface of the sand pool and took it smartly out again. The sand closed up round where her finger had been — running in, again, like water — to leave no sign that its surface had been disturbed.
“Will you stop doing that?” the drone said, tiredly.
“Apologies,” Tefwe said. “How does it move so smoothly?”
“The grains are spheres,” the drone said, clicking something back into place on the solar array. “They are polished, individually where necessary. I call the stuff sand because it starts out as ordinary sand and still has the same chemical composition as the raw material, but really the particle size is reduced almost to that of fines, and the polishing process leaves each grain almost perfectly spherical. See.” The drone shifted in the air, humming very faintly.
Tefwe stood and straightened as a bright screen suddenly filled the air in front of her, seeming to dim a significant part of the sky and putting her in shadow. The drone had produced a holo display like a magically produced cabinet hovering in front of the woman. The holo showed two grains, highly magnified. One appeared to be about the size of Tefwe’s head, and was jagged, crystalline, all straight edges, spires and juts; not unlike the rocky outcrop itself. It was rainbowed with diffraction colours. The other was pebble-sized, a glass-like shiny blonde and seemingly a perfect sphere.
“Before and after,” the drone said, shutting the screen off and letting the blast of sunlight fall upon Tefwe again. Her eyes adjusted, putting a black dot over the sun to reduce the glare. The sunlight was so strong her vision would have been affected by light coming in through the surrounds of her eyes, so they would be partially silvering, she suspected. Something similar had happened to areas of her skin, again to cope with the ferocity of the sun’s glare. Grief; I’m going silver. She was, she realised, starting to look like a ship’s avatar.