Chapters (29)
“Traditionally, people tell each other secrets at this point,” Marshal Chekwri said to him, in a brief moment when the others were all making their goodbyes and choosing where to stand, and with whom. “Mine,” Chekwri said, with a smirk, “is that I failed my officer exam. I cheated. Blackmailed a senior officer to get the pass.” She shrugged. “Never looked back.” She put her head to one side. “You?”
He stared at her. For an instant he wasn’t sure he knew who he was staring at, or why, or that he knew anybody or anything any more. Eventually he shook his head. “Too many,” he said, almost too quietly to be heard, turning away from her. “Too many.”
Jevan and Solbli, his secretary and aide-de-camp, were there, and he was astonished when it was Jevan who said he had always loved him, not Solbli, whose secret was that she had no secret.
He mumbled something, lost for speech for the first time in many decades.
They chose the end of the just-started minute as the time they would go. They all joined hands and when the time came they all said the words and went, just as a small rain shower began.
In the end he went with everybody else.
He was re-made, and yet he had been destroyed. He knew he would have done all he could, in his additional incarnation within the android on Xown, but still – again – it had not been enough. Had he been successful, he might have stayed behind, with something to celebrate and to live up to. Instead, he could only admit defeat. It was some consolation that nothing calamitous happened in the interval between the failed operation inside the Girdlecity, and the Instigation that was the beginning of the Subliming.
All that mattered now was that the crew of the Uagren had accepted him, and he was part of the ship now.
No Presence needed to appear; ship AIs were capable of performing their own Enfolding.
Agansu went with them.
In the end she didn’t go, not there and then. She knew what this meant.
“I can’t leave without you!” Warib had wailed from the screen, the sea blue-green behind her, the happy voyagers forming up in their last formations, hugging and crying and choosing who to hold hands with.
And in the end all she could say was, “Yes, you can, mother,” and kill the connection, knowing that she could, and that she would.