That triggered another laughing incident. “This won’t get easier,” Ash mentioned. “But I need to learn. If I can master your species, I could do anyone.”
“What does ‘do anyone’ mean?”
“My profession,” Ash began. Then after some consideration, he said, “I make a modest living by peering inside other minds.”
The 31-1 knew this already. Except what he knew was rather different from “peering inside other minds.”
“You’re doubtful,” the human observed.
“You see doubt?”
“And curiosity. And a powerful need for honesty too.”
“There are incidents inside my mind. Eternal scenes where your customers speak about you and your unusual profession.”
“Which customers?”
“I see their faces. Show me faces, and I will tell you.”
“I don’t care who. Just tell me what they believe.”
“You are an interrogator. In other realms, you are given humans tied to horrible acts, and you place them where they deserve to be, and you make them admit to their crimes.”
“That,” said Ash, “was a very long time ago.”
The 31-1 didn’t contest the remark.
Human shoulders lifted, then fell again. “I’m talking to your species. Asking about each of you. And some tell me that you rather enjoy standing outside this pretend world. More than anyone else. Is that true?”
The 31-1 never relished being outside his home, but there was pleasure in summoning the courage to travel. The Great Ship was full of marvels that would never be seen here, and what wasn’t unpleasant was often amazing. And by comparison, nothing in this World was amazing. And the same was true in the original World, his left-behind home.
“I don’t know the minds of others,” said the 31-1. “What pleasures them and what they believe are mysteries. But I think you know the minds of others.”
“My face,” Ash said.
“Yes?”
“During your travels, have you ever seen my face?”
Every question had a perfect, truest answer. But the task of memory was very difficult. Past upon past needed to be examined. Time wasn’t crossed to reach the answer. Time was nothing but an exercise in mad mathematics, like imaginary numbers and existence without substance. And there were ten trillion realities that were strung together, this 31-1 emitting a series of translated sounds. Those sounds told the human, “I’ve seen your face three times other than this time.”
Ash was studying the screen. Then he was looking up at his companion, showing his teeth. “You remember me.”
“And rather a lot more than you.”
“I remember seeing you once,” Ash said. “And thinking to myself, ‘God, that is one splendid creature.’”
The 31-1 was bathed in prideful pleasure.
He didn’t want to leave this moment.
What did that say about him?
Every species was carried by its narrative, by a long history and endless accommodations to the impossible. Every species could be understood partly and only partly, and that meant your own species too. Living with the 31-1s had changed Ash. He was absolutely more aware of being human. But there were incidents—not moments—where he felt separated from time. Change inside the universe was unthinkable. Realities were pressed close to one another, and he was free and eternal, sharing the world with wise neighbors who were rather less peculiar than one tribe of upright, uptight mammals.
Ash was born on Mars. Humans wasted their affections on balls of warm rock and hot metal, and the entire body wore that very arbitrary name. But of course nothing lived inside a planet, and no planet ever wished to be named. To the 31-1s, names were granted only to those places where living bodies stood, and their original World was a ribbon. Woven from eternal memory, the ribbon was that precious narrow and very rich boundary between brutal cold and incinerating heat. No creature walked; motion was a ludicrous concept. But sturdy legs stood everywhere in the World, every timeless life embraced by the beauty, and that was the vision that the very best dreams gave to Ash.
Hundreds of billions of planets were tidally fixed. On most of them, life was forbidden. The suns were too close, and even the night side was a blistered wasteland. But there were planets where life thrived inside the narrow middle zone. Plants or something like plants were fed by the low sun, the climate more reliable than not. But those fertile zones were often too narrow or too fragmented to support complicated, mind-ruled life. And the difficulties didn’t end with the richer planets. A bully sun might spit flares or otherwise butcher what couldn’t flee. Moons changed orbits, turning or tipping the planet in less-than-ideal ways. And the continents could be drowned under deep oceans or shoved in and out of paradise by the amoral tectonics.
The 31-1s were unusually blessed. The planet beneath them was massive, but it wasn’t as wet as most superterran, ocean-swaddled bodies. The daylight side was punctuated with volcanism and deep basins, and an ice sheet covered the night side, fattened by whiffs of steam from the sun-bathed regions. Every glacier eventually pushed towards the heat. Moraines and loess mountains ruled the boundary, ice melting into rain clouds and rivers, and that’s where the 31-1s stood. Where the sun was low, the air agreeable. They stood where they belonged, and concepts such as days and forever didn’t apply, because forever was a single day, and that had to be part of the story explaining what they were.
But only a small part. After all, the galaxy was full of changeless circumstances. Yet there was no second example of these creatures, and that’s why the 31-1s were spectacularly precious.
In his dream, Ash wore a 31-1 body. Enormous and filled with keen excitement, he felt close, very close, to that point where he would be transformed, existing inside a multitude of realms and every good memory always in reach. But he inevitably grew nervous, and that always made him tremble. Trembling was motion; motion wasn’t permitted. Ash woke just enough to realize that the delicious nap was nearly finished. Laying in the shade of the immortal bristlecone, he struggled to keep his eyes closed. The meanings of the universe. The alien world that he had never seen for himself. What flavor of tea he would boil next. Those were the great thoughts that filled a busy, happy mind.
But then he was entirely awake, and without fail, some piece of his mind insisted on remembering Mars and its long terrible war and the Cold that was waiting for every man.
Objects were responsible for nothing but their locations, fixed and outside time. The giant starship didn’t plunge through a vacuum at any fraction of light-speed. No, the Great Ship was set where it was needed, where the universe demanded it to be, and the competent mind inside the Ship had found a rich location, and that’s where he remained. Rigid as a statue, he stood inside a succession of brilliant days and the nights that were nearly as bright as day. The avenue beneath him was paved with glowing shells and frozen resins. The locals were dissimilar in appearance from one another and relatively poor compared to the typical passenger. These creatures had never seen a 31-1, and in many cases, they did not see this 31-1. They were too busy or too indifferent to notice his existence in one place and another place and a third midway between the two. They didn’t see him watching faces for the one face that mattered. But of course all faces mattered, each being a mask obscuring long rich lives that he would never understand. Not in any reality worth the calculation, that is.
Days and nights. Days and nights. Calculating the passage of time was unnatural. Ash’s good friend had to struggle to count one hundred days and ninety-nine nights, and he still wasn’t convinced by the numbers. And if he didn’t find the man here? He would allow the universe to carry him back to Ash and further instructions. In another hundred days, perhaps. But that was too much of a calculation, casting numbers into the future. 31-1s were happiest when they conquered one piece of ground, living on their stored fats, watching every indifferent beast that was here and then elsewhere and then back again.