Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2022-09-27T17:00:00+00:00

6.4 Gothi/Gethli

I mean, we probably went too far, after that.

The blame is entirely yours.

We are very good at doing what we do, none better, but Herself is placing a great deal of reliance on us, and the situation is not entirely suited to our talents. It’s the girl.

Because she’s there.

Everything’s there. That’s the definition of everything. That it’s there. The things that aren’t there are nothing. Ergo.

In the ancient forests of Earth, we learned to be attracted by novelty, because sometimes it could be eaten or used as a nesting material. The investigation of novelty became the basis for whatever claim to intellect we might have had in our ancestral state. That is me, and I am the foundation upon which you, the thinker of new thoughts, build upon.

So basically what you’re saying is I’m nothing without you.

At last you understand. And, after Earth, they threw our native state on the anvil of Rourke and beat at it with hammers. A colony not entirely dissimilar to the rather more basic arena of Imir here. Although one where the colonists simultaneously had a higher level of technology and yet were far less successful in preserving themselves.

They didn’t think of the children, Gothi.

But what came out of Rourke, even if it wasn’t a viable human colony, was us. And what engineering and evolution conspired in us to do was develop an analytical facility so complex that, put the right two of us together, it can have this sort of recursive conversation with itself while it does its job. Give us a place to stand and we can catalogue a whole world: me to sort the new data from the old, and you to decide what to do with it.

I haven’t decided yet.

Because this world is all new, all the time, and that’s a lot of data to sort through. Except there’s one thing that isn’t new all the time and that’s Liff. We’re always running into Liff.

Which paradoxically means it’s the thing which is always the same that is new. And the cascading differences in everything else become the background sameness we can ignore.

So we went and talked to the girl. Stopped actually searching for what Herself told us to find. And we read her storybook, because the writing system here is one we’ve met before. So we did our best to be like what’s in her book.

Because that way we’re fitting into her world-paradigm and she’d understand and do what we wanted.

And how precisely did that work, might I ask?

. . .

Hmm, Gethli?

You tell me, you’re the one who remembers everything.

Liff, sitting up in her bed in the grit-built farmhouse. The shutters of her window open. Two birds hunch there, feathers fluffed against the chill of Imir’s winter. Their heads are never still.

‘The Witch sent you,’ the girl says, which seems to be within-paradigm from the point of view of Gothi. It’s only Gothi’s point of view we have, of course. Gethli doesn’t have the neural architecture to hold on to things like this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.