She shook her head. “I didn’t tell anybody.” She sighed. “I put it in my private journal and General Reikl knew about that, but I suppose that all got destroyed when the Reg HQ was blown up.”

“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.”