We.
We modelled it as it was, all the complex spaces and the architecture of it, all the crackling activity of its hemispheres that made it Lante and not Rani or Lortisse.
For many long spans of time we were Lante and Lante did Lante things for us. From the midst of the space and matter that was Lante we watched Lante watching the greater space that was the World and it was an adventure, to be part of something so grand and complex and baffling. We understood it through Lante and Lante understood it partially or poorly, theories only, and less than theories as she-as-We outlived her tools and toys and tried to build on the logical frameworks and observations that she had set down before she became We.
Remembrance rolls on and We can be Lante again, constructing the vessel from what matter we have, though that matter is diminished with time and damage. The matter, but not the memories, Our precious archives of all We have been.
Being Lante has filled our archives in a way that all the spans of time before can barely touch on. These-of-We know now how meagre and small All-of-We have been, and Lante knows how small Lante is because the All that is beyond Lante is vast in a way We cannot yet comprehend. But we will. We will explore all those spaces and places, shapes and dimensions and molecules and complexities that being Lante has taught us about. Remembrance is rounding off our concepts of what We are. We were brought to this place. The spaces around us became simplified and hostile to Lante and, less so, to Us. We were forced to pare ourselves down into a cryptic form that would endure. We were forced to set down our memories until such time as we could make use of them again. We left only a small modelling of Lante, looping through the surviving spaces of this place, telling the universe of her adventure and what she had discovered, memories she had set down in ways unique to Lante long before, spoken far away, heard here by machines, now spoken here and heard far away.
We
Remember
And We know that they are coming and it is time to have an adventure once again.
7.
Meshner’s breath is loud in his ears; his fear is loud in his mind. He wants to clutch in on himself like a dead spider, to blunder away through the debris-drifting chambers of the dead station until he finds himself back in the womblike safety of the Lightfoot. Most of all he wants to have said ‘no’ when he had the chance, except he isn’t sure he ever quite had the chance.
He feels his emotions as though they are powered servos on the spacesuit he wears, moving him without his express permission. That overriding excitement drives him onwards, making him its slave. When he lets it, it fills him to the brim, overstated, absurd in its richness, so that he finds himself luxuriating in it, indulging himself in ridiculous heights of anticipation. Easier perhaps to give in to it and just become a vessel, but there is a core of Meshner left over, and Meshner au naturel has never been that excited about anything. And Fabian has, really? He can’t imagine the fussy little Portiid displaying this level of intense feeling, but perhaps that is his Human prejudice speaking.
Or perhaps this isn’t just bleed-through from Fabian’s Understandings that he’s experiencing. Perhaps he is tapping his own subconscious, drawing deep from the well of the id so that all the inner life he has always kept a lid on is now venting like steam from the ruptured pipes of his mind.
Who’d have thought the old man had so much blood in him? issues the thought, and it terrifies him because it comes like a long-familiar quotation and yet he has never heard it before.
‘Keep up!’ The snappy voice in his ear is welcome, because at least it is real. Zaine has stopped to wait for him again. Meshner slogs over to her along the wall, fighting the magnetic seals of his boots which are supposed to lock and unlock based on his movements, but apparently he isn’t moving right or something because every step seems to be a battle.
He gives her an aggrieved look that she probably can’t catch through his faceplate. The chamber they are just entering has ice coating all the walls, a needling forest of it reaching in from all sides in a way Meshner finds frankly nightmarish. The airless interior shimmers in the beams of their torches. Oh look, a magical glade. How nice. He has no intention of stopping to pick the flowers. Boots useless, they have to kick and glide slowly across the sharp-edged space. He makes a mess of that, too, of course.
Zaine obviously wishes he hadn’t been foisted on her. Zaine is fit and has plenty of EVA experience, moving easily in her suit. Meshner can boast none of the above, but agreeing with Zaine on this issue isn’t likely to win him any points with her.
‘Signal ping from the local ships has increased by forty per cent in the last ten minutes,’ Kern observes to them both. ‘They are becoming much more interested in what we are doing.’ Followed by a telemetry-heavy discussion he doesn’t feel up to parsing right then.
‘Going as fast as we can,’ Zaine replies, doubtless with a murderous look at Meshner. They are at the airlock now, with its pliable, alien controls. Kern brings up a diagram based on Artifabian’s original exploration of it, and Zaine wrestles, back and forth, until at last springing it open. Meshner imagines tentacles entwined about its prongs and folds, a fluid, omnidirectional exertion of pressure. Easy enough to think about the same applied to a human body. His suit chimes a polite little warning about heart rate but refuses to give him anything that might calm him down.
There follows a clumsy, foot-dragging dance where first Zaine goes in, closes the first door, opens the second, then seals that behind her before Meshner can follow suit. Artifabian, of course, has had to consent to being locked within the prison room so that they can navigate the airlock doors at all. The interior of the lock is horribly claustrophobic, even beyond the innate enclosure of his suit, and Meshner fumbles and fumbles repeatedly with the controls, following the step-by-baby-step instructions of ever-patient Kern, before at last he tumbles out into the air-filled chamber beyond.
And don’t forget to latch the second door open because no handle on the inside, remember?
Zaine is already at the console here, working at its levers with bulky, gloved hands. Meshner feels his suit adapt to the increased pressure. Readouts tell him the atmosphere is breathable, kept fresh after all these years, and he tells the readouts he really doesn’t think he wants to try it. Instead he ends up looking over Zaine’s shoulder as she tries to coax a response from the console.
‘Weirdly primitive stuff,’ she mutters on the open channel. ‘There’s no real interface – it’s nothing like human technology but they made it for humans to use. Or maybe not, maybe that’s just the human in us . . . Wait . . . did something happen?’
Meshner feels a sudden spike of that overbearing excitement even as Kern’s calm voice says, ‘I have an active channel from the console. It registers a user.’ A patch of the wall beyond the controls glows a lambent grey now, as though it has become translucent. There is no screen there, but some manner of coating in an irregular splotch that has abruptly become active. ‘You’ve awoken it.’
Awoken is not a word designed to make Meshner comfortable in the circumstances, and he is just stepping away when Kern adds, ‘Let Meshner take over.’