“You were dealing her a very good hand,” said Bao.
“I was dealing her from the bottom of the deck,” mimicked Ellin, with a smirk. “I learned cheating from one of the actors. What do you think of her or it?”
“She is being obdurate, I think. Very severe. And while you are being so free with the cards, she was winning from me five credits.”
“Poor thing. I’ll owe it to you.” She paused, looking at him thoughtfully. “Gandro Bao, will we have to do something dreadful? Like recommend the wiping out of all the mankind on the world?”
Gandro Bao shook his head, though he was no less troubled than she. “We are not recommending, Ellin. She is doing that. All we are doing is finding things out.”
They stayed together a while longer, taking reassurance from one another’s company, before seeking the equal comfort of real beds after shower baths in real water. Though the Questioner needed neither, she made sure that her assistants were well looked after.
She in the meantime, had been left to her own devices. She frequently remarked as much to her attendants, intrigued by the phrase, for it was literally true. Her memory, her maintenance machines, her elaborately miniaturized equipment, her IDIOT SAVANT, the syncretic scanner she used in her attempt to find patterns where none were apparent, all were her own devices with whom she was frequently left.
Just now, she needed her maintenance machines. She always put off maintenance until the need for it became what she thought of as painful. Though she was not designed to feel pain, the intense unease occasioned by delay in response, by inability to remember immediately, by mechanical parts that did not function precisely or systems that did not mesh, must, she felt, come close to what mankind meant by pain. It could be avoided by getting maintenance more frequently, and she could never remember between maintenance sessions why she did not do so. Nonetheless, she always put it off, without knowing why.
This time, she took with her into the booth the data cube that the trader had sent. She inserted it into the feed mechanism, and directed that during maintenance it should be entered into permanent memory. Then everything went gray, as it always did during maintenance. Time stopped. All thought stopped as well. Only after her linkages had been disconnected, only after her memory as Questioner was off line, was the cause of her discomfort made manifest. Then, and for a brief time afterward, her mankind brains, those three with which she had been endowed, remembered who they were. Mathilla remembered, and M’Tafa, and Tiu. During that time, the separate entity that was the Questioner knew why she judged some societies as she did, and why she felt about them as she did, and how deep her prejudices went, even though they never showed.
When her usual maintenance was complete, after the linkages were reestablished and the memory hooked up with all its shining achievements on display, Questioner did not move, did not utter, did not recollect, for she was still holding fast to Mathilla and M’Tafa and Tiu, unwilling to let them go and they, within her, were holding fast to life once more, unwilling to be gone. Then, usually, the booth door opened automatically, and the stimulant shock was provided, and she wakened, as one wakens terrified from dream, only to feel the terror fade, and shred, and become as gauze, as a thing forgotten, as it always had before.
Not this time. This time she found the memory remained with her, firmly planted inside her files, their names and faces, the stories of their short lives, and how they had died.
MathiUa. M’Tafa. And Tiu.
32—Ornery Bastable Goes Upriver
Ornery Bastable arrived in Gilesmarsh when the Waygood came in to unload a cargo of gold-ash and dried Purse fish. Since it would be some time before the Waygood had discharged its cargo and been loaded once more, Ornery had a whole tenday to herself.
She intended to spend part of in Sendoph, where Pearla had recently achieved statistical normalcy by bearing a living daughter after a run of one stillborn daughter and two sons. First, however, she intended to spend a day or two in the Septopod’s Eye in Naibah, seeing what she could find out about the thing she had seen, or almost seen, when she had been marooned in the wild. Though she was not imaginative enough to have frightened herself into a funk over the experience, she had resolved to ask some questions next time she had time in port, and now seemed as good a time as any.