It was possible to quarantine a Mind or other high-level AI so thoroughly that no force or process ever heard of within the Real could get to it or communicate with it (its substrate could be physically destroyed if you threw enough weaponry at it, but that didn’t count) … but no known means of isolation could prevent something from the Sublime establishing contact with a copy of itself still within the Real, and somehow persuading it to come away, or just quietly stealing it. About the only crumb of comfort when this happened was that the relevant substrate in the Real stayed put rather than accompanying the newly departed; whatever process in or from the Sublime caused all this to happen was thorough, but not greedy.

Still, all this had worrying implications for Minds, which were not used to being at the mercy of anything at all (aside from the aforesaid vulgar amounts of weaponry), but they did a pretty good job of not thinking about it.

Even the individuals who did properly return – usually decades or centuries after Subliming – rarely stayed very long back in the Real, disappearing into the Sublime again within a few tens or hundreds of days. The Zoologist was one of a tiny number of returnees who looked like they might be back indefinitely.

The Caconym had thought all this through, however, and had decided that it was prepared to take the risk of having something inside its innermost field structures that might have not just ideas of its own but communications of its own too. So the fact that something might be happening deep inside what was effectively its brain that it had no control over – something to do with the ever-mysterious Sublime, of all things – was not as troubling to it as it might have been.

The Zoologist’s avatoid looked hurt. “You’ve never said anything before.”

“It was never important before.”

“Not important? Unexplained events in your own substrate? Really?”

“I gave you a home freely, without conditions. Also, I trust you. Plus, while undeniably a little worried, I felt privileged to have what I took to be vicarious, and possibly unique, contact with a realm that remains inscrutable to us despite all our techno-wizardry.” The Caconym’s avatoid shrugged. “And, frankly, I’ve been waiting for a situation to arise wherein I could use this knowledge to try to shame you into telling me stuff you probably wouldn’t otherwise.”

“Honest of you to admit.”

“Disarmingly so, I hope.”

The Zoologist’s avatoid pulled its arms in tighter to its body, seemed to think for a moment. “I still have some contact, though it’s all very … inchoate. Inexplicable. Hard – impossible – to translate back into here, the here-and-now.”

“Try.”

The Zoologist sighed, put its long-fingered hands to its face and made a sort of patting motion. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“What? How intrinsically ungraspable it all is?”