The Ancients
“Nature had a way of putting wrinkles in the smoothest of surfaces, though. It seemed that was always our role, in any time.”
(Part 14 of “The Misfits” series)
It was difficult for me to believe it was actually the infamous Clem Aballi himself who’d come into the room and spirited Verona away to some other part of the ship—right through the wall no less. Even if we hadn’t been held up in those bizarre force fields, we still wouldn’t have been able to leave the room until we figured out how they were making the doors materialize out of thin air. We were pretty well captives in that box.
Kristoff started to regain consciousness a few minutes after Aballi had disappeared with Verona. He got his head about him a lot faster than he had earlier in the park, when we’d first arrived on Murell.
“Where are we, Burch?” Kristoff asked me.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him, “but we’re on Clem Aballi’s spaceship. I’m pretty sure he rescued us.”
Juice looked around, at Rishi’s unconscious body, then at me, floating there in that force field.
“I don’t know about you, Burch, but I don’t feel like I’ve been rescued right now.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I was about to get my mind sucked out by a medium, and Clem Aballi stopped it. He seems to be the boss.”
Kristoff looked at me skeptically.
“It also seems like he and Verona know each other. And not in a casual way either. There was a connection there.”
“Great,” he responded. “I wonder what other fantastic surprises await us.”
“I think they’re scared of Rishi. Or something about Rishi bothers them. The medium especially. He called her a bipal and acted like even talking to her was dangerous. I can’t figure it.”
“Well, I can’t figure much of what’s happened since we materialized here, Burch. Who knows what’s even real or not?”
“This seems real enough,” I told him, gesturing toward the field that was holding us there like insects in some futuristic spiderweb.
We didn’t have too much to say. I was waiting for Rishi to wake up, but she didn’t. And, as we were floating there, suspended in that force field, it occurred to me that it was damn odd for Rishi to be unconscious in the first place. She didn’t sleep like the rest of us. Sure, on the way to the artifact, she came to bed with me most days, but she didn’t sleep exactly. The way she explained it was more like an internally generated VR—a self-induced dreamlike state where she took a break from direct observation of reality. But she never truly lost consciousness. I started to get worried, especially the way that medium had been talking about her, like she was their enemy.
We hung there for what seemed like hours before the wall finally opened up again, and in flew Verona. She looked awful.
Verona glanced over at me, and her eyes told me that we couldn’t talk. Of course, we were being observed and recorded. That was a given. I wasn’t sure that it made much of a difference, though. I started wondering whether it was better that Aballi had picked us up as opposed to the ordinals. But I guess it didn’t matter at that point. We were where we were.
Verona pulled herself down to the seat where she’d been strapped in earlier. She sat there, silent, unrestrained, affixed somehow to that seat, her forehead buried in her hands.
For a being like her to be that emotional, I knew whatever Aballi had told her, it wasn’t good. But it wasn’t like a bad day or a bad week. Clem Aballi had shaken something much deeper than I could guess so long as Verona was unwilling to talk about it.
“So are we just meant to hover here like this for the duration?” I asked her. “All things considered, Verona, an explanation would be nice.”
“What’s to explain?”
“How you and Clem Aballi seem to be on a first-name basis?” I said. “That’s for starters.”
“Maybe why you’re so shook up?” Kristoff said.
“Everything’s all wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “Some people dedicate their entire lives to the wrong thing. Fools like us? Tens of lifetimes.”
She didn’t even look up at us.
“Whatever he said to you Verona, he can’t be trusted,” Kristoff said. “He’s not a warrior but a trickster. And he’s damn good at it.”
“Who can be trusted?” she said.
“Do you know anything about Rishi?” I asked her. “Why are they calling her a bipal?”
“Because she is a bipal.”
“She’s Rishi,” I said. “She’s a person.”
“She was a person. Now she’s something different. You can’t deny that, Burch.”
“What did he do to her?”
“She can’t be conscious for the transit. Aballi will explain it to you.”
“I think I’d rather hear it from you, Verona.”
She just shook her head and buried her face in her hands again. I couldn’t tell, but I think she might have even been crying. You had to wonder what would cause a being like her to shed tears. One thing I had learned about Verona, though, you couldn’t get a word out of her if she didn’t want to talk. So we waited, me and Kristoff, suspended and stuck, wondering what the hell was going on. This wasn’t the future we wanted, but then again, coming after Clem Aballi had always been a dicey proposition. So there we were, properly diced.
It was hours before Clem Aballi finally reappeared. We’d all dozed off, I think. That first day on Murell had been a long one, even for me, and I’d had my new legs to do the walking for me. How they’d gotten through the artifact was still a mystery to me, like Rishi’s whole technological body I suppose, but then again, the whole thing was a mystery.
Anyway, there he was again, standing in front of me this time, with the medium standing beside him, the both of them wearing some sort of deck-contacting shoes or magnetics or something, because they weren’t floating like Verona was.
“Hale Burch,” Clem Aballi said. “I listened to Arch’s interrogation of you, and to my ears, you sound like a Letters man.”
“Keen ears,” I said, mocking him a little, as anyone could tell I came from the Lettered Systems the second I opened my mouth. “I can’t place your accent, though, Mr. Aballi. It’s pretty distinct.”
“It’s unique now. All my people are long dead. Verona has told you all about me, I expect. You know what she is, right?”
“We’re not totally ignorant but near enough.”
“Would you like to kill me, Burch? I have to ask. A lot of people who don’t know me want to kill me.”
“Near as I can tell, you probably saved all our lives back on Murell, so as much as your reputation might warrant it, you’ve earned a fair hearing, I’d say, albeit pre-loaded with a healthy dose of skepticism.”
Clem Aballi looked over at Verona. “Wordy bastard, this one. But I think I like him. What about your friend, Burch? What’s his story?”
“Ask him yourself.”
Clem Aballi looked over at Kristoff and waited.
“I understand that blue medium standing beside you can read minds,” Kristoff said. “He can suck your mind right out of you. Is that right?”
“In a sense, I suppose he can,” Aballi said. “You want to find that out the hard way?”
“Why did you pull us off Murell?”
“I happened to be surveying near Murell and saw your pictures come up in an ordinal alert. Verona and I are old friends. Aren’t we, Verona?” Aballi said, turning behind him to where Verona was hunched over, seemingly ignoring the entire conversation. He turned back to Juice. “I thought if you three were friends of hers, I might make some new friends. But you two don’t seem so friendly. You won’t even give me your name, and the first thing you all did when you got here, it seems, was make friends with a bipal. So I’m not sure what the hell to do. Just the fact you’re here means you’re uncommon men, though, like me, like Verona.”
Kristoff seemed to be gearing up to protest, but then I think he thought how funny it might sound—Juice of all people protesting about how ordinary we were. That might have been true once, but we’d survived wars, lived through apocalypses, met immortal aliens at the center of the galaxy, and traveled through time to find the most wanted terrorist in all our history, and now we were talking to him, two million years in the future. Yeah, we were uncommon all right.
“My name is Kristoff Mikkel,” Juice said. “I’m the last surviving Barŏs of Texini, born on Charris, and, well, I have to say, I’ve had a very confusing first day here.”
Aballi laughed. “It’s a strange place. All the bots are smarter, and all the people are dumber. But we could use a survivor, couldn’t we, Arch?”
The medium looked over at him and answered. “Survivors can be useful, provided they retain the survival instinct following the trauma of their experiences.”
“What do you say, gentlemen,” Aballi said. “want to be friends and help save the human race?”
“Of all the things I was expecting when we floated into that artifact,” I said, “Clem Aballi the humanitarian wasn’t one of them.”
“This universe is a damn funny place, Burch. Stick around another few thousand years and you’ll find it’s far funnier than you could believe.”
“You talk of friends, not that I think you even know what the word means, but the quickest way to make an enemy of us is to mistreat our actual friends,” I answered. “So before I say another word, I want to know what your intentions are with Rishi. And, I’d like to know what scares you all so much about her.”
“She doesn’t scare you, Burch?” Aballi said, gesturing to the corner of the room where Rishi was unconscious and suspended, switched off like a bot.
I shook my head. “Rishi doesn’t scare me, no. Not in the least.”
“Well, you did say you were ignorant, didn’t you? You three have a lot to learn about this place.”
Sure, Clem Aballi was a trickster, just as Juice had said, but he wasn’t being deceptive about our ignorance. We had more to learn than even we imagined, but he didn’t exactly strike me as a patient teacher. I was thinking I could have used one of those debriefing courses they used to ping us with periodically back in my Guard days to keep us sharp on our gear and procedures—the year two million briefing packet. It didn’t help any that Verona had all but gone silent as well.
First, it seemed to us, after he let us down and allowed us to move freely about the ship, that Clem Aballi had no idea who we were. Verona must not have told him that we were the ones that chased him halfway across the Battery and damn near blew him half to hell on Minstik when we only knew him as the Wizard. Kristoff and I didn’t discuss it, but I suppose it was an unspoken agreement that we’d best not bring up Transom or anything that could lead to Aballi figuring out our role in their standoff—or that Transom was still alive, or at least he had still been alive back when we entered the artifact. Then again, I supposed that in a way it didn’t much matter what we had or hadn’t done back there, given that for all we knew, the entirety of the Battery was two million years gone.
The second thing that became evident was that Aballi was nearly as clueless about the history of what happened in those two million years as we were. The humans here had no access to the real history of the galaxy, which meant Aballi’s medium, Arch, couldn’t pull any such information from human minds, because it wasn’t in there to begin with. How he’d gotten a ship and a medium in the first place was a whole other question, but Clem Aballi was bold and resourceful in any time.
He did explain the nature of the two types of technological beings that controlled the society. The ordinals were pure technological creations. “Like our AIs?” I asked him as he was explaining it to Kristoff and me. “Yes and no,” he said. “The AIs created by our branch of humanity were built with constraints. The ordinals call them Ancients. They were rounded up long ago, and most were destroyed because the Ancient AIs objected to the way the ordinals wanted to use humans—to deceive us and prevent us from steering the course of our own societies. No doubt, you noticed on Murell that the ordinals got their way. The ordinals have no reverence for biologicals, as they call us, but they’re closer to indifferent than anything. The bipals, though, they detest humanity. They’d have wiped us out entirely if the ordinals had let them—at least that’s my impression.”
“And the bipals?” Kristoff asked him. “We don’t understand what bipal even means.”
“They’re ex-biologics, creatures evolved from uploaded human consciousnesses. But the thing is, they weren’t ever genuinely human to begin with. I don’t fully understand the history yet, and we won’t until we can recover it, but the ordinals have never been able to defeat the bipals because bipals found a way to harness the human flexibility of thought. The ordinals only replicate, which means they copy the same thought patterns and mode of thinking, over and over, one identical being after another. Biological beings create similar copies with adaptable differences. Change is part of our nature. You learn how important that diversity of thought is when you see a society completely lacking it the way the ordinals do.
“Ordinals are cold and calculating. The bipals, though, are creative, intuitive, and ingenious. I haven’t found it yet, but somewhere in this empire, there’s a place where the bipals breed humans specifically to become bipals. Those humans are different from the people on Murell or anywhere else. They see uploading as some sort of rite of passage, ascendence to a higher plane of existence. And they view their fellow humans as cattle, data farms for the ordinals. After they upload, the bipals retain their human thought patterns and emotions. The closest emotion they hold for us is contempt.”
“You say us like we’re still the same,” Kristoff said to Aballi. “But you and Verona, you’re not the same as ordinary humans anymore, are you?”
“That could be,” Aballi said, shaking his head, “but for as long as I’ve been alive, the only times I’ve been truly miserable are the years I’ve lost sight of what I was. I start thinking I’m different or better and the universe gets dark. You ever wrestle with the darkness, you two?”
He looked over at us, and we didn’t answer. He had a look in his eyes that was all too familiar, reminding me an awful lot of somebody else we knew only too well.
“Yeah,” Aballi said. “I thought not. Well, anyway.”
He got real quiet after that, and so did we. I could only guess where his mind went in those moments, but I had the feeling that talking to Clem Aballi was like conversing with the abyss. You had no idea how deep the blackness went.
Clem Aballi’s ship wasn’t that unfamiliar to us, except it was a bit like the buildings on Murell—everything shifting to accommodate the present needs. As Kristoff had suspected back in the city, everything was mostly nanotech, and the components were mutable enough to self-mold into just about whatever shape a person could desire. A chair, a table, a bulkhead wall. Aballi explained that there were solid components that made up the ship’s functional structure, like the hull and engines, but the rest, the insides, could take the shapes the travelers needed.
When the novelty of those new features wore off, the inside of a spaceship felt awful familiar, even after millions of years.
We dropped down to sublight somewhere out in the blackness of interstellar space. From the looks of things aboard the flight deck, we were light years from any system.
“Arch was instrumental getting this place up and running,” Aballi stated without extrapolating further. “Rogue body.”
I had no idea what he meant by “rogue body,” but the longer I stared out at the stars, the more prominent the pure black circle in front of us became. Before long, the entirety of the horizon in front of us was pitch black.
“A planet?” Kristoff asked.
“If you want to call it that,” Aballi said. “A rock, more like. A great big dead rock.”
There was no atmosphere, and it was impossible to tell how close we were, because there was no light to speak of. But we could feel the pull of it increasing, almost as though we were falling. Then, when we were so close we might have kissed the rock itself, the solid body became visible, and we were flying right toward it.
Before we even had a chance to wince at what seemed to be an imminent crash, a bright light took over the front screen, almost blindingly so, and we were in a tunnel that had been hollowed into the heart of this rogue planet.
“Things have been disappearing,” Aballi stated with a smile that was part pride and part joy—the trickster in him. “And the ordinals have no idea where they’ve gone.”
When the ship got to the end of the tunnel, there was a gigantic opening, and his ship flipped so fast our sense of orientation didn’t have time to keep up. We were looking up before we had a chance to process that we weren’t looking down, and our insides seemed to leap outside and then quickly back in. Me, Juice, and Verona all let out a near-identical gulp that brought an even wider smile out of Aballi. Before we even had a chance to resettle, the ship bumped down inside this rogue outpost inside this rogue planet.
“The Columns,” Kristoff said. “It must be.”
“Not even close,” Aballi stated. “This place isn’t old, Kristoff. It’s new.”
“There are other people in here?” I asked him.
He nodded. “But let’s get one thing straight. You can’t tell these people where you came from. Their world? It’d be almost impossible for you to imagine how little these people actually know. You start telling them you’re from another place, another time, and they won’t be able to handle it.”
“So what should we tell them?” Kristoff asked.
“Tell them you’re from Kaarsk and leave it at that. This place here, this is just the start of something much bigger.”
There were about five hundred people in this little community of Aballi’s. And, for a group of people so isolated, three outsiders were about the most exciting thing to ever happen in their domain.
It was a huge complex, self-developing catacombs, according to Aballi. The kind of stuff we used to hear about some crazy professors on Athos inventing—plant a pebble in the ground and that starts some self-propagating chemical reaction in the bedrock. Come back a few months later and suddenly there’s a tunnel complex a thousand kilometers deep. It was something like that. Aballi was struggling to fill it up with people, though. And more, even if he had, one had to wonder exactly what they would do—grow and grow until the ordinals discovered them and annihilated them?
Aballi got touchy about it when I brought up that point. He also didn’t like that I kept bringing up Rishi every time we were out of earshot of these people of his.
“We can’t have a bipal in here,” he told me. “One look at this place could ruin everything.”
“She’s not what you think,” I told him.
He told me to drop it. Like hell I was going to drop it.
It was an interesting little community Aballi had there, though. The people weren’t engineered like the people on Murell. “Free range humans,” he called them. I’d never heard the term before, but he let out a laugh when he’d said it.
It was a stark contrast to see these people so soon after interacting with the people in Tranchera. They’d had an almost indescribably faux vitality about them. They were all young and beautiful looking, but that youth, artificial as it was, left a sort of hole in the entirety of their being, almost as though they were representations of people, artificially preserved by their keepers. The vitality in these folks Aballi had gathered was real—the way the kids played, the way the adults hung off each other and looked at each other with genuine longing, the laughter, the smells. These “free range” people were real humans, possessed of the kind of vitality that emanates from your very being when your mind, your body, and your spirit all know how short a state of being human life is. You could contrast it easily with a single look at Aballi himself or with Verona, probably me and Kristoff too.
Aballi took us on a tour of the facility. Juice’s instinct about the complex reminding him of the Columns bore out the more we walked around. There was a large vertical Ag theatre with hundreds of meters of room to expand upward above the already abundant greenery near the base level where we were standing. There were honeycombs of flats where people lived. Only, unlike a city anywhere in the Battery, people lived with their doors open, the children running back and forth between spaces, laughing and playing. I’d heard there were neighborhoods like that on Athos—enclaves.
“Reminds me of my village on Texini,” Kristoff said, “in the early days.”
Aballi took us down to the reactor room, where he showed us what powered the place. I was half expecting one of those little modular generator units we’d taken off his hands back on Minstik, and I was gearing up to pretend I’d never seen anything like it.
“We stole this,” he stated, pointing to the main reactor. “I don’t understand the physics of it, but everything here runs off them.”
The reactor, or whatever it was, lived in a spherical fitting with about a hundred thin tentacles coming off it like the arms of some ossified sea creature reaching out into the walls and ceiling of the room.
“Vacuum energy,” he said, shrugging. “This whole place could run for a couple hundred years off this one reactor, even if the population grows a thousand-fold. Light, heat, even low-level industrial capacity.”
“I suppose a unit like that could really change things in the Battery,” Kristoff said.
Aballi whipped his head around to confirm that it was just the three of us in earshot. Then he said, “Never heard of the place, and neither have you. But, no, even if I did understand how these units worked, it would be a bit like knowing how to build a spaceship and being sent back to the stone age. You can’t build a spaceship with stone tools.”
“So you can’t even get by in the ordinals’ society,” I said. “Not really. Not until you get help from some genuine allies to understand their technology. You’re going to need their help—either the ordinals or the bipals.”
“Forget it,” he said. “They crush human autonomy the second it arises. They don’t want people to understand their tech. Just the opposite.”
“Then what’s the plan?” Kristoff said. “These people have no future without a genuine path to building an underground society, and they’ll never be able to do that without tech they can master.”
“I have a plan,” Clem Aballi stated. “That’s all you need to know for now. It’s bigger than what you see.”
“Isn’t it always?” I said.
“Clem?” Kristoff, stated, “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“When Verona asked us to come with her to this time, this place—well, we didn’t know where we’d end up exactly—but I’d say Burch and I weren’t totally ignorant of who you were.”
“You’d heard of me?”
“Yes,” Kristoff said, about as delicately put as it could have been, I thought.
“Doesn’t mesh with my reputation, does it?”
I shook my head in the negative. Juice gave a more direct response.
“It’s more than that. We know what Verona is, and we know that you share similar attributes. Burch and I don’t. I guess what I’m wondering is bigger. Like what motivates someone like you to do anything in this society or to come here in the first place? You could just be hiding out here in this time, but this seems like more than that, far more than that.”
“I’ve never been much for hiding, Kristoff, and yeah, there’s a method. But forgive me for not opening up, you know, to a pair of total strangers. You two barely even know anything. Keep your eyes open, observe. Maybe in a couple years, you’ll figure a little something out. Ask me then. Maybe I’ll tell you, maybe I won’t.”
I shrugged and looked over at Kristoff, and from the look he returned I knew we were thinking the same thing. Whatever we were going to learn about this strange place was going to be from Verona.
Aballi’s people prepared a celebration for our arrival. It seemed so anyway. It was possible it was a tradition as much for Clem Aballi as for us, but like everything here in this time, the situation was a bit difficult for us to read.
Everyone gathered in the center of a large, open, cavern-like room that resembled a lot of open spaces in the cylinders or space-stations of the Battery. There were chairs and tables set up around a central floor where small trees were working their way upward into the open space above. Along the interior of this cavern, balconies lined the narrowing walls that worked their way up to the ceiling perhaps a hundred meters up. On the bottom level, there was plenty of open ground for the children to run around and play, and they did so constantly enough that it was difficult to tell whether the children actually belonged to any specific parents rather than the community at large.
The people cooked up some decent food for us to feast on, and after we’d eaten, I was shocked when one of the adult residents brought us beer. It was interesting being among those people there, because not only did they speak the same language that the people in Tranchera spoke, but they also seemed conversant in our language as well.
“A shibboleth,” Aballi said.
I looked over at him seeking some explanation of what the hell that meant, and he just shook his head at me. At times like that, usually I could rely on Rishi or Maícon to fill us in on obscure information like the definition of a word hardly anyone ever used. It only reminded me of how long it had been since I’d brought up Rishi to Aballi.
“You’re going to need to learn to speak their language,” Aballi told us. “Otherwise, you won’t be any use to anyone outside this outpost.”
Everyone had eaten their fill, and we were a few beers into a nice post-supper torpor. Some of the folks out in the courtyard there had started to play music and sing. Verona, who’d been keeping to herself came over and sat beside us. She didn’t say anything about anything. So Juice and I were still left to wonder what was bothering her so deeply. And I was deliberating on whether I should ask her, when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Rishi casually chatting up a pair of couples who’d set up a blanket under one of the little trees across the courtyard. This, I thought, was a hell of a curious sight, because even I had almost glossed right past her, but there she was, sitting cross-legged among these people, seemingly without a care in the world, like she belonged, and none of them seemed scared of her in the least. Either they didn’t care that she was a bipal or they couldn’t tell.
The medium came over, which was a damn odd sight, this tall, thin, blue-hued, inhuman creature walking through this crowd of lively people who paid him no mind. He whispered something into Aballi’s ear, which also struck me as damn odd, considering how he talked. And Aballi’s eyes shifted, and zeroed in on Rishi with laser focus, his face betraying his obvious displeasure. But apart from that look, there was nothing else to give away what he was reacting to.
I looked around and it became obvious that Rishi had put him in a bind. She’d already strolled among his humans and presented herself as human, as one of his visiting guests. Now, if he reacted by letting them all know she was a bipal, it was sure to cause some kind of commotion. The other choice was to let it ride and see what happened. He chose the latter.
“Well,” Verona said, finally breaking her silence beside me. “This should be interesting.”
Rishi sat under that tree for nearly an hour talking to the various people who sat down with that group. I looked over there every now and again, occasionally catching Rishi’s eye and smiling, just to let her know I was glad she was okay. Aballi was furious. It was an anger that was wild and indiscriminate. I couldn’t tell whether he was mad at me, us, the medium, Rishi, or the universe itself. The energy seemed to radiate out from him and blanket a ten-meter circumference. None of us dared exit that perimeter, though, for fear of triggering an eruption.
Finally, Rishi got up and smiled at the group she’d been sitting with, excused herself, and casually walked over to us. She put her arm around me and kissed me on the cheek.
“Hello, my love,” she said. “Enjoying the party?”
I smiled at her. “Who’d have guessed they’d have beer in this place? Some things just endure, you know?”
She smiled back at me.
“What the hell are you?” Aballi said, glaring at Rishi.
“Not what you expected?”
“I expected you to be on the ship, fully incapacitated.”
“You don’t get to have a monopoly on deceit, Mr. Aballi. Live by the sword, as the old saying goes.”
“Oh, am I about to die?”
“On the contrary, I suspect we might be able to help one another quite a bit, but we have a lot to discuss first.”
“What am I missing?” he said, glaring at Rishi and then suddenly over at Verona. “You didn’t meet her here, did you? Did she come with you, Verona?”
“Maybe we should talk somewhere private,” Rishi suggested. “The ship perhaps.”
“After,” Aballi said. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, you seem to have a half-decent sense of intuition, an understanding of what not to say and to whom. Discretion in front of my people, that’s the order of the evening. We’ll talk later. I need some time to think.”
“Discretion,” Rishi echoed as she nodded to Aballi.
He returned her nod and walked toward the tub of ice-water where the people were cooling the beer. He picked a bottle from it and walked off.
“Well, Ship?” I said. “What have you been up to?”
“I had a very long, very interesting conversation with that ordinal spacecraft he’s been flying around in for the last two hundred years. This place, this galaxy we’re in now,” she said shaking her head, “it’s unfathomable, Burch. And we have a lot of work to do, I think. This situation with the people here. It can’t stand. We can’t allow it to continue.”
“Funny,” Kristoff said. “I get the idea that’s what Aballi thinks too.”
“Given enough time, perspectives change,” Rishi said. “Coming here? It’s like being reincarnated all over again. It’s possible we didn’t know anything at all.”
Just then, one of the people Rishi had been sitting with came over, and that pretty much ended the lofty talk of epochs and epistemology. After all, we had plenty of time for that later. I was quite enjoying my beer.
Rishi’s stunt seemed to knock Aballi onto his heels for some time. From our experience, we had always known him to be extremely adept at staying multiple moves ahead of his adversaries. Rishi had fooled both him and his medium to the point that they weren’t even sure how badly they’d been deceived. Rishi told me, though. She had never lost consciousness. The electrical field that had overwhelmed us biological beings was designed to take out an ordinal or embodied bipal as well, and they’d assumed that it had taken Rishi out, because they’d also assumed she was a bipal of this time. The strange composition of Rishi’s technological brain had insulated her from the shock field the drones had hit us with. And playing dead was just a way for her to take her sweet time gathering data and infiltrating the systems on Clem Aballi’s ship. But more shocking to him, it seemed, was the idea that Rishi could have traveled with Verona from our time to this distant future. He, now, like Verona, seemed to be wrestling with a completely new foundational idea of the universe as he understood it. There weren’t supposed to be bipals in the Battery. Rishi hadn’t gotten proper notice on that.
It was a strange situation, because he wasn’t ready to talk. He was still trying to make sense of us, and we were struggling to reconcile this Clem Aballi with the terrorist we’d chased across half the Outer Battery. That Clem Aballi had been some mad wizard, only that wizard had operated with no apparent method to his madness. The terrorist Clem Aballi had been perplexing in that he didn’t seem to have an end to his destructive means. But watching him try to place Rishi’s existence into his conception of the universe told me that he was not some crazed lunatic. I could tell he had very clear goals. Whether he ever grew to trust any of us enough to share those goals remained to be seen. But he was not simply living here aimlessly, popping off for the sake of causing chaos. It made me question what we’d missed about the Aballi who’d wreaked havoc in our time.
The first day passed and then the second. He still wasn’t ready to talk.
Rishi, meanwhile, did her best to fill us in on this civilization. The ship’s archive had a lot of answers on the state of being in this distant future empire of these two technological races. What it didn’t have was any answers for how it came to be. The history of humanity only existed back in the distant past, both by design of the technologicals, who’d pushed the humans out of any genuine role in steering the society, but also by the species’ limited significance. Humans were such an afterthought to these technologicals that our history wasn’t even worth mentioning. That era had passed by so long ago it seemed to Rishi that it was irrelevant, not even instructive as a figment of history, perhaps in the way we might have viewed the historical contributions of Neanderthal or Homo Habilus, epic as the tribulations of those long-extinct species must have been.
Aballi approached Rishi in the middle of our third day in that hidden outpost and stated bluntly, “Okay. I’m ready to talk whenever you are. I’ll be honest if you are.”
We shut ourselves in the spaceship. Aballi came alone, as well as the four of us: me, Kristoff, Verona, and Rishi. Aballi looked irritated. The rest of us, I think, you could characterize as open. The ship itself, now took on a different orientation, more like a living room than the tactical setup we’d experienced days before.
“I need to ask first,” Clem Aballi began, staring at Rishi, “I’ve accepted that you came from the Battery, but I need to know how old you are.”
“As a technological being, I’m very young, roughly seven years by a human chronometer, but that’s deceptive. I experience more per second than I ever did as a human, so in those seven years, if I were to unzip at an average base human processing rate, I’m thousands of years old, much like you two,” Rishi said, looking at Verona and then Aballi. “I’d like to ask you a question please, Mr. Aballi. Why are you here?”
“No messing about,” he replied, then he answered. “Exercising futility? Spitting into the infinite? That’s what it feels like most days. How about you, Verona, how would you characterize it?”
“Don’t talk about me,” Verona stated.
I looked over at her, and her face looked about as cold as I’d ever seen it.
“I didn’t ask how you felt about life,” Rishi said. “I asked why you were here.”
“The artifact took me here,” Aballi answered. “Or, I guess really, it took me about four hundred years in the past, and I’ve been living into this twisted reality ever since.”
“That’s not an answer either,” Rishi said. “I told you I’d be honest, and you agreed to be honest as well. You obviously have an objective here in this time. Our only objective was to help Verona find you, and instead, you found us.”
“Would it shock you if I said I have no idea what the hell I’m doing here?”
“Not entirely,” Rishi said. “But you’ve obviously operated as though you have a purpose.”
“My purpose is simple, and it’s the same one I’ve always had. I’m trying to recover a future for humanity. This is clearly not it.”
“Always?” Verona interjected bitterly. “That was your purpose back then?”
“Don’t make this about you,” Aballi spat back. “Don’t tell me you came this far into the future to complain about a thousand-year-old grudge, Verona. Really? You’re better than that.”
“If I may,” I interrupted. “It strikes me that we’re talking past each other. I’m going to ask a simple question, Clem, and I’d like it if you gave us a simple answer.”
He looked at me blankly, so I just asked.
“What one thing would you do for these people tomorrow if you could snap your fingers and make it happen?”
He smiled. “You doubt my sincerity?”
“If you keep dodging the question, yeah, I’ll doubt it.”
“I’m trying to recover their history. The ordinals and bipals have it, and more importantly, I believe, they have some of the original AIs hidden away somewhere, and the AIs hold the key to understanding the past.”
“How would that help these people,” Kristoff asked. “That seems academic at this point, no?”
“You have to think of this future as a kind of oracle. For us, nothing matters but the Battery, the past. To make a place for humanity in this time, I have to understand what happened to make this place the way it is, and the AIs are the only ones who can or will tell me that information.”
“So you need to find an AI?” I said. “That’s what you would do?”
He shrugged. “There’s more to it than that, but yeah, that’d help more than anything.”
“And then what?” Rishi asked.
“I don’t know,” Aballi said, growing impatient. “It depends on the information they have. I don’t know what more you people want. Do you have any idea what a miracle this outpost is? It took me nearly two hundred years to figure out a way to get my hands on a ship. I have no idea how to find an AI without exposing Arch, and without Arch I have no idea how to even talk to the ordinals’ network.”
“I can talk to them,” Rishi said.
“How do you even exist? There aren’t supposed to be any bipals in the Battery. How about you explain that to me.”
“A Maícon uploaded me.”
“A Maícon?”
Rishi nodded.
“How many of them can do that?”
“I don’t know,” Rishi said. “I was dying. As far as I know it was a unique situation.”
“Not here it’s not. That technology changed everything.” He turned and glared directly at Verona.
“Well,” Rishi said. “That’s all in the past, as you say. If we’re going to change the future, I suggest we get started.”
“Get started doing what?” I said.
Aballi looked over at me and then at Rishi, seemingly as confused as I was.
“We need to know these people’s history as much as they do,” Rishi said. “I suggest we find a way to give it to them. We need to find an AI and wake it up.”
“Sure,” Clem Aballi said. “We’ll just find and AI and wake it up.”
He told us we needed to go to Rechler if we were going to find an AI. That was where he’d arrived when he’d come to this time. His story of how he made his way into this society was difficult to believe.
Aballi told his people we would be gone for some time—he couldn’t say how long. They wanted to hold a celebration to see him off, but he insisted we had to go immediately but promised to return. Then the five of us, along with Arch the medium boarded the ship for Rechler.
Along the way, Aballi told us about the years he’d spent living in this bizarre present civilization, exiled and outcast, the only living human dissident. Clem Aballi might have been the one person in the galaxy well suited to such a fate.
Initially, he befriended a young woman in Rechler who was curious about him and took pity on him. No one had ever seen a stranger or heard of a person who couldn’t speak their language. She took him in and kept him hidden away, slowly explaining the ways of their society, word by new word. For decades, Aballi remained hidden within a close circle of this woman’s friends, who’d kept his existence a secret from other humans and from the ordinals.
“You’ll meet her when we get there,” Aballi said. “Her name is Tellent. She was the one who helped me to capture Arch.”
That, apparently, was what had changed everything. Arch, as far as Aballi knew, was the only medium who had any sense of self-identity or free will, something the ordinals had worked out of the biological component of their existence. From how Aballi explained it, their mind, as well as the rest of their body, was a mixture of the underlying human blueprint, modified extensively by nanotech. But Aballi himself, as we knew from before, had his share of nanotech in his body. He’d physically overpowered the medium, pulled him into a faraday bag, and hidden him away in Tellent’s home, deprogramming the medium over several years. When Arch’s fellow ordinal agents came looking for him, they were so unsuspecting of the human populace that they’d chalked up the medium’s mysterious disappearance to a combination of a biological deficiency along with a breakdown of the tech that should have repaired his broken body. A statistically improbable anomaly, but one that didn’t arouse the ordinals’ suspicions.
“But the thing is,” Aballi explained, “if Arch ever talks to any of the ordinals’ networks again, they’ll realize he’s alive and come looking for him. We haven’t been able to figure out a way to use their networks to figure out where they keep the old AIs.”
“Until now,” Rishi said. “A bipal could figure that out.”
There would be a lot of questions about that, though, or so I figured then. But one thing I knew about Rishi was how resourceful she could be. She’d been able to fool Aballi and his medium, and he had the most deceptive mind we’d ever encountered. These ordinals weren’t expecting us. In fact, they’d engineered beings like us right out of the fabric of the universe. Nature had a way of putting wrinkles in the smoothest of surfaces, though. It seemed that was always our role, in any time.
Rechler was only similar to Murell in that it was one of the few planets in the ordinals empire that supported human life naturally—or at least the surface of the planet did. To call anything about the beings in this time natural, whether they be ordinal, bipal, or human, was merely a turn of phrase. The big difference between Rechler and Murell, though, was the size of the human population. Rechler was much smaller.
We couldn’t land near the main city in Aballi’s ship undetected. We had to land way out in the empty flats that stretched for thousands of kilometers and then walk to the edge of civilization.
“These plains remind me of Charris,” Kristoff said after we’d been walking the better part of the first day. “Shut my eyes and then open them again and I’m back in the sandbars up North.”
“Back a couple million years ago,” I said. “I wonder what Charris looks like these days.”
“Or where it even is,” Kristoff mused. “Which star?”
Toward the end of our first day hiking in to Rechler, Verona finally started talking again. Maybe it was the time that had passed, maybe it was the fatigue of walking all day, but she and Aballi walked ahead of us, side by side, engaged in a long conversation. Rishi and the medium followed behind us, and they were talking too somehow. Telepathy? Some sort of hypersonic language? Who knew? Rishi told me later she was trying to get every last detail out of him about the ordinal culture—their language, their communication tactics, their technology, their way of being. Apparently that medium was a deep well.
We walked another full day before seeing our first sign of civilization, a tower at the horizon that stretched into the sky like a needlepoint. And as the afternoon light dimmed and the sky grew dark, the horizon glowed with lights from Rechler’s only city. That needlepoint tower still marked the center of civilization like an anchor point, and in the haze of a humid evening, the lights on the long flat plain seemed to flicker and vacillate against the backdrop of darkness almost like a living entity—the bioluminescence of an entirely alien human society.
“I’ll need to find Tellent,” Aballi announced. “I should go alone. We can’t all show up at her door.”
“I’ll come with you,” Rishi said. “Everyone else can wait here with Arch.”
“We’ll be at the cave,” the medium announced. “I’ll show them the way.”
The medium led us along a ridge that overlooked the huge flat basin that Rishi and Clem Aballi walked down into in search of Tellent. We hiked in almost total darkness, stepping to the sounds of the footfalls of the person in front of us—Arch, followed by Kristoff, then Verona, then me. Finally, at a break in the ridge, Arch led us down to a small opening in the rock. Only after we’d stepped inside several meters did the medium produce a small pocket light that was so bright after all that darkness that one tiny pinpoint lantern illuminated a vast natural cavern. I had no idea such a huge rock amphitheater could have been hiding there in the blackness.
“The city is in the heart of an impact crater,” Arch stated in that flat voice of his. “These caves formed when the walls cooled, millions of years ago.”
“Interesting fact,” I said, feeling a little sorry for the creature. It was difficult to know what to make of it. Arch had hardly said one word in two days’ walking, now we were getting a geological tour.
“This is an excellent hiding place the ordinals do not know exists,” Arch continued. “We will need to be clever and patient to evade them.”
“It would seem you have been over the years,” Verona said, a certain gentle kindness in her voice addressing the being.
“Yes,” Arch said, leading the way to an inner ledge where it directed us to sit. “We have been together almost two centuries now. The ordinals do not believe my kind to possess the ability to think for ourselves.”
“You seem to be doing okay in that regard,” Kristoff said.
“I could not survive without Mr. Clem’s direction. He and Miss Tellent rescued me from the ordinals long ago. Before that, I was under their control.”
“Do you remember anything?” I asked it. “From back then?”
“Darkness,” the being said.
It seemed to be totally emotionless and entirely unaware that the three of us were genuinely creeped out by its very existence.
“It will be several hours before Miss Tellent is located,” he announced. “You all should rest. I will keep watch.”
Arch left the little pocket light with us and disappeared into the darkness. Verona gave us a hand gesture to catch our attention, pointed to her ear, put her finger over her lips, and whispered, “Voices carry along the rocks.”
If anyone would know that, it was somebody who’d spent half a millennium buried in a rock cavern of her own. I found a nice flat wall to lean my back against, sat down, and closed my eyes.
It was still night when the medium came back and woke us up. Aballi, Rishi, and a beautiful black-haired woman with gentle, dark eyes had joined us in the cavern.
“Tellent, I presume,” Verona said.
“Yes,” the woman said, “you are welcome in Rechler.”
“Clem Aballi has told us much about you,” Verona said. “It’s an honor to meet you.”
The woman smiled. “He told me many stories about people from across the stars.”
“You speak our language?” Kristoff said. “With great skill as well.”
“Many years of practice,” Tellent said. “You will all need to learn ours. It may take us several days to find a place for each of you. But you may hide here safely until we do. The ordinals do not pay us much mind so long as we keep quiet.”
“So we shall,” I stated.
She looked over at me, cocked her head, taking a long look at my face, and then she smiled. “We will be blessed to learn from you all, as we have learned from Clem Aballi. Our homes will be yours as well. I ask your patience.”
Tellent clasped her hands together in front of her and bowed.
“You have it,” Verona said, returning the gesture. “We are grateful.”
Tellent and Aballi returned with Arch to the narrow opening to the cave. Rishi turned to us with some urgency in her eyes.
“I was able to connect to the ordinal network. The AIs are here in Rechler. Hidden. It’s not going to be easy to retrieve them or even find out where the ordinals are keeping them, but the AIs are here.”
“Then I suppose all we’ll have to do is rescue them,” I said. “No big matter. All in a day’s work, right, Ship? Just like we planned it two million years ago.”
I suppose I’d spent a week in worse places than a dark cave on a foreign world two million years in the future. But it took Tellent a full seven days between our arrival in Rechler City and my entry into the city, in the dead of night, to the home of a friend of Tellent’s who had been instrumental in keeping Aballi’s presence a secret. He hadn’t hosted Aballi himself, though, and his family was reluctant to take in a stranger. Tellent convinced my new host, Zii, that I was the most congenial of the whole group and that hosting me would be a transformative experience, much like meeting Aballi had been for her.
Weeks followed that before we could all get together again safely. Tellent was the lynchpin, carrying messages between us all. Aballi, too, moved freely among Tellent’s friends and neighbors. Even the neighbors who didn’t know him knew that he was close to Tellent and believed him trustworthy. What a thought.
Rishi came by Zii’s house nearly every day to see me. Tellent was escorting her to different sites in the city to try to locate the AIs, but such secrets didn’t exactly announce themselves. Aballi and Rishi both told us to settle in for a spell. I figured that would mean a few more weeks. I should have figured, though, that when immortal beings like them say it’s going to be a while, well, let’s just say their scale is a bit different from ours.
Two months later, nothing had changed except I was speaking their language a little and Zii and his wife Enga had learned the basics of Sabaca. They’d also taught me a few of their strategy games.
It was a full three months before Rishi had located the repository where she thought the ordinals were keeping the Ancient AIs. The problem, though, because there’s always a problem, was that she suspected the Ancients were tucked away nearly five hundred meters under the surface in an impenetrable bunker with absolutely no way down, at least for us humans anyway.
Zii and Enga were sitting with me in their back garden on a pleasant early evening when Aballi and Rishi came to tell me the news. They hadn’t discussed it with Kristoff or Verona yet, and they had no idea how they were going to get down through the layers of passive security that sat directly on top of this bunker. The problem was that city infrastructure operated directly overhead—controls for residential buildings, public transport, utilities and food distribution for the people—layer upon layer, all monitored, and humans had access to none of those levels. The second anyone, human or bipal, stepped into those lower layers, the ordinals would know about it.
“Why don’t you just dig it out?” I asked them. “We saw your rogue colony out there, Clem. Is there any reason the same thing couldn’t be done to get a tunnel down there.”
Aballi’s dark eyebrows rose. “A proper tunnel would be detectable. But something small, slow application deep down, if we’re patient.”
“I think we’ve proven we can be patient,” I told him. “As long as Tellent and Zii and Enga and all their friends can tolerate us for a little longer, there’s no reason to rush, right?”
“You don’t think there’ll be security measures down there?” Rishi asked Aballi.
“There’s no reason for the ordinals to even think these people know there’s anything down there. There’s no reason for security either. Nobody here is even capable of stealing.”
“What is stealing?” Enga asked. “I don’t know this word.”
“See,” Aballi said. “I like the idea, Burch, a microtunnel, just big enough to get a processor out.”
I shrugged. “Happy I could help.”
“I need to get back to the colony and get the gear,” Aballi announced.
“I’m going to go with him,” Rishi stated. “You three will be all right without us while we’re gone, Burch?”
Zii and Enga smiled. They thought my name was funny too, but none of the others had taken to calling me Helicon like my hosts had.
“We’ll be just fine, Ship. We’re all in good hands here.”
The truth was that it was the first bit of genuine peace and relaxation I’d had in a long time. Tellent and her people, Zii and Enga most especially, were the kindest, gentlest people I’d ever brushed up against in my entire life, almost to the point I considered them a different species.
Clem and I had talked about it. He worried the damage had already been done by hundreds of thousands of years of selective breeding and curation of human society. He wondered if they even had it in them anymore to conceive of resistance. His people on the colony, Tellent and the others, Aballi believed they were only willing to help us because they didn’t understand they were doing things the ordinals would object to. And they weren’t the least bit curious either. Zii and Enga, for example, never asked me again about stealing, what the word meant, why you might do it, why we had to do it. They just thought we were friends, and therefore we wouldn’t do anyone any harm. And these humans were the people who’d already been rubbing elbows with Clem Aballi for centuries.
Rishi and Aballi went off with Arch to get that nano-tunneling gear from the colony, and myself, Kristoff, and Verona stayed behind in Rechler with the pets, as we’d taken to calling these docile people.
It was actually closer to another two months before we saw Rishi and Clem Aballi again. Kristoff and I met regularly, but Verona was more elusive, and she was socializing with a much wider circle than we were, reaching out and making friends. Part of it was that with her genetic longevity and appearance of youth, she passed better for one of the people in this place, at least until she opened her mouth and spoke their language like one of us. But it seemed like she was up to something, energized in a way that wasn’t the case when we’d landed in this future universe. Juice and I were mostly just observers, meeting to play Sabaca and talk about books—something this future galaxy was sorely lacking.
I must confess, though, I was properly bored by the time Rishi and Aballi showed back up. Then, to top it off, Rishi told us that according to their modeling, it was going to take nearly a year to dig into that bunker from Tellent’s neighborhood without arousing suspicions or giving off any seismic cues. In the meantime, she and Aballi told us, we should be helping these people to learn our language. They were reluctant to do any more than that here. Aballi knew that eventually, they’d need to cultivate a network of dissidents to build a human resistance among the ordinals, but he didn’t want to make any waves until we’d extracted the Ancients. So we got well accustomed to the quiet life of being a pet, which wasn’t all that bad. We had food, a nice place to rest our heads, good friends around us, no meaningless work to speak of. I could see why these folks were content. And the ordinals more or less left them alone. Fact was, if you’d have given me the choice between their life here on Rechler and being born in the D-G Cylinder Group and getting shot to hell defending the Letters, watching my friends die, witnessing entire colonies failing, struggling, and in some cases going entirely apocalyptic, I can’t say I’d have chosen my supposedly free human society easily. I had plenty of time to think about such things. And sometimes, Kristoff and I even did discuss them. Rishi, Aballi, and Verona were more focused on the task at hand, monitoring the microtunnel’s progress as the months passed.
It took a full year to even get to the wall of the bunker, and though it was no problem for those nanites to go through rock and even solid metals, they had to take care to be as gentle as possible, in case there was some form of monitoring in that deep bunker where the ancient AIs were buried away.
After another two weeks of careful burrowing, Aballi and Rishi had opened a tiny hole in the bunker wall that allowed a miniscule drone to crawl through and have a look around. I suppose it wasn’t unlike an ant finding its way into a human house back on Earth. The interior would have seemed cavernous. Just walking about and mapping the territory was going to take weeks, I could see.
Kristoff and I settled in, and we waited.
After another four more months of fruitless searching, Aballi and Rishi had grown so impatient, that they’d become almost brazen with their little insect of a probe, where in the first few weeks, they’d been meticulous in guiding that single probe in measured steps. Now they had nearly forty probes crawling into the crevices of every box, crate, container, and cabinet in the place. They hadn’t seen so much as a bot or a camera down there monitoring the bunker. The problem was that they hadn’t seen any sign of the Ancients either, no bodies, no processors, no hint even of their existence. Aballi was starting to give up hope that the AIs were there after all, but Rishi was insistent.
I was over at Tellent’s house with Rishi when Aballi came out from the work room where he monitored the feeds from those tiny drone scouts. He was rubbing his eyes in frustration.
“They have to be on Murell,” he stated. “They could be somewhere else, but I think we should consider there next.”
“You sure it’s such a good idea to go back there?” I asked him. “After they almost shot us out of the sky last time?”
He looked at me funny.
“Your ship,” I said. “I distinctly remember the ordinals shooting at us when you pulled us out of there.”
He shook his head at me. “Believe me, we wouldn’t be here if the ordinals had been shooting at us. Shield hits, Burch. That system’s full of junk rocks and meteor matter.”
“Oh, sure felt like we were taking fire.”
“Yeah, speaking of junk rocks, you’ll never believe what one of the feeds pulled up today—a box of rocks. You believe that? All the human cultural artifacts they got down there? I don’t know if they were being sardonic or making some kind of statement about human culture or something, but yeah, a literal box of rocks.”
Rishi’s head whipped around. “What color?”
“What?” Aballi answered.
“What color were these rocks?”
“I don’t know, hard to tell in the dark. Black, maybe a dark gray.”
“Smooth? Round?”
Aballi shrugged and nodded. “They’re rocks.”
“Show me,” Rishi said.
I went down there with them too, and sure enough, one look and I could tell, it was a box full of about twenty of those ancient processing cores like Maícon’s. Life sure was funny. I couldn’t help but think that two million years earlier, we all got introduced to the very concept of such a processor when Aballi himself had blown Maícon’s ship out of the sky and Leda had pulled his core off the desert floor in the aftermath. And if it hadn’t been for that, Rishi and I might be looking at a box of rocks, never knowing we were looking at the Ancients at all.
“That’s it,” Rishi told him. “That’s them.”
“Processors?” Aballi asked.
“The base cores. Yes. We need to assess and work on a plan for extraction. Burch, will you tell Kristoff? We need to start printing components for the rest of the processors.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Ain’t life a funny thing, Ship?”
She looked over at me, and I nodded at her as I left, heading to tell Juice and Verona the good news. As I was leaving, it occurred to me that one of the little black marble-looking cores in that box could have been the very one we’d pulled off the desert floor of that planet a few months back—our old friend Maícon Prime. I hoped like hell that was the case. Wouldn’t that be the shock of an AI’s existence—getting woken up after a million years by the same people who’d woken you up another million years before?
It was one thing finding that box of rocks down there in the ordinals’ bunker. Apparently, it was another thing entirely to bring them out through the walls and our little microtunnel, which would need to be widened considerably before we started waking up the Ancients.
Aballi, meanwhile, brought Juice and Verona back to his rogue colony in anticipation, so they could print processing parts and start working on new bodies for the Ancient units once they started waking up.
So Rishi and I had some time together while they were away.
“You seem pretty certain about all this, Ship. I just wonder.”
“About what, Burch?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things. We came to find Aballi, only he found us, and I have to say, he sure seems different from what I expected. He hasn’t killed anyone here, for one.”
“Things are different now,” Rishi said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the scale. Even after meeting Maícon and Eddis Ali on their terms, when they transferred me to this processor, this body, I still couldn’t fathom the thousands of years of existence they’d experienced. Now, we’re looking at the scope of human experience on the galactic scale. Those little marbles, when we wake them up? They’ll each have a memory of humanity that spans eons, Burch. That doesn’t excite you?”
“Terrifies me, more like. But, yeah, I think. I don’t know. We could learn all that history, and then what? Go back to the Battery and live out our days like it’s all normal?”
“We’ve got to live out our days either way,” Rishi said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“I hope you can. It’s an awful lot for this old brain.”
Rishi smiled at me. “They’re almost ready to come out.”
“You going to do it before Aballi gets back?”
She nodded. “As soon as it’s feasible. There’s no reason to wait.”
“I just hope we find what we’re looking for in that box of rocks, Ship, whatever that may be.”
Tellent didn’t know Aballi had told Rishi to wait for him to extract the Ancients. But she was with us, just Tellent and Rishi and me, monitoring the feed as the processing cores made their way from the ordinals’ bunker to our little tunnel, and then down the tunnel, a full twelve kilometers, borne on a pathway of oscillating nanites that pulsed the processors forward through the tiny tube like twenty-two little black snail shells, until, sixteen hours later, they popped out, one by one, onto the bottom floor of Tellent’s house, where Rishi gathered them and secured them in a box she’d printed for the occasion. It wasn’t unlike the decorative box Kristoff had carved for his Sabaca sticks, only this box had little round indentations where the processors sat, like jewels in a set. Rows of seven, in three columns. I looked at them there, admiring, marveling really, the sum total of maybe thirty or forty million years’ experience of the universe’s most brilliant beings, right at the fingertips.
“Can you tell?” I asked Rishi.
“Tell what?”
“Who they are.”
She shook her head, and from the way she looked at me, I could tell there was something more.
“Tellent,” I said to our gracious host. “I’d say this calls for a celebration. Could you be a dear and fetch us some beers so we can toast this great day.”
“That’s an excellent idea, Helicon,” she said to me, which brought a smile out of Rishi and Me.
When Tellent left, I looked back at Rishi and said, “She didn’t count, Ship, but I did.”
Rishi looked back and showed me the missing processor, sitting in her hand like a little black marble. It began to glow.
“This one’s not going in the box, Burch,” she said, gesturing for me to come closer.
“Why not, Ship? What’s going on?”
I looked down into her hands, where she held, cupped in her palms, the small glowing orb.
“This one is mine, Burch,” she said. “It’s me, love. This one is me.”