And are we any further forward regarding whatever ship or ships might have been helping Mr QiRia in the past?

∞

Barely. I have contacted the Anything Legal Considered and tried again to contact the Warm, Considering. The former appears willing to help but says that it has had no contact with or knowledge of Mr QiRia since visiting Perytch IV twenty years ago with Ms Cossont. The latter seems to be on a retreat or is unavailable for some other reason. I have contacted its original home GSV, the A Fine Disregard For Awkward Facts, and its most recent home/contact, the GSV Teething Problems, requesting both to ask the Warm, Considering to get in touch. I suggest that all interested parties do all they can through any contacts they may have to find and/or contact the Warm, Considering and/or any other ship or entity that might have been helping Mr QiRia recently. The Warm, Considering is the last ship known to have facilitated Mr QiRia in his travels and efforts to stay out of the public gaze, but it might have been superseded. It might also be worth attempting to contact any extant ships or entities known to have helped him before the Warm, Considering. I believe a ship called the Smile Tolerantly fulfilled this role, though I am having difficulty contacting it. Again, any help would be appreciated. I have instigated a search for data on any other such vessels but it has so far met only with subtle obstruction. Whether this may count as some sort of success is moot.

∞

I’ll pass the word along. May I allow your identity to be known by the others?

∞

I suppose so. Sooner or later somebody would have collated my search requests with those doubtless soon to be forthcoming from others and made the connection.

∞

Welcome to the club.

He was always surprised how hard it was to see cities from space. You worked out where they must be from knowing how they looked on maps, but they never leapt out at you in reality the way they did in diagrammatic form. Even when you could make out the city and it was one that you knew well, you sometimes needed help to find where important buildings and landmarks were, even though they ought to be obvious.

Septame Banstegeyn gazed down at what his implants assured him was the location of the parliament complex in M’yon, but without the overlay he’d have struggled to identify it. How important it had always seemed, how important it genuinely was, to the lives of so many, and yet how tiny, how insignificant. He sighed, looked away, took in the whole sweep of the planet of Zyse – well, as much as he could see from the orbital base, which was only a few hundred kilometres up, so incapable of providing a view of the entire globe. Ah, the fabulous solidity of a planet.