Codrin Bălan — 2346

It took both Dear and its partner to talk Codrin down from eir desire to simply get right to work.

“My dear, if, as he said, Tycho was going to take a nap, perhaps you ought to do the same.”

“I know,” ey replied, shoulders sagging. “It’s hard to get out of that mindset of having to just work.”

“I know it’s enjoyable,” the fox’s partner said. “But seriously, Codrin, even if you’re not going to take a nap, take a thermos out onto the prairie and walk for a bit. Tycho is going to need quite a bit of help, given what you told us of him–“

“And if True Name is already involved.”

“That too, yeah. So it’s probably best to go into the whole thing prepared for jittery astronomers and…well, whatever True Name is, these days.”

Codrin nodded. “That makes sense, at least. Do we even have a thermos?”

“Probably. I’ll go digging. Might as well make a fresh pot, while I’m up.”

“You, my love, are a true delight,” Dear said, tail flitting this way and that.

They grinned, walked off to the kitchen, and started clattering around in cupboards for a coffee therm.

“Dear, have you talked to True Name recently?” Codrin asked after a polite pause.

It shook its head. “Not in terms of a conversation, at least. I have received a few messages from her in the intervening years, several of which were sent to several Odists as a group.”

“She does that? What are they? Orders or something?”

It shook its head, ears flapping slightly at the movement. “No. Or, well, not exactly. They are simply updates, or replies to other, ongoing conversations. Many of us still communicate with each other on a somewhat regular basis, and I have been looped into several of those conversations over the years.”

“Wait, “not exactly”?”

“You have met her. She does not need to order, oftentimes. She simply suggests.”

Ey frowned. “I sometimes worry that we’ve been attributing almost magical manipulative abilities to her, honestly.”

Dear shrugged. “Perhaps, but she also has had more than two hundred years of study under her belt to find all of the best ways to interact with people. May Then My Name was something of a let-down for her, I think, even from the very beginning, so she had to learn to take on that mantle herself.”

“Especially over the last few years, you mean? With Ioan?”

“Perhaps, though I think that might be ancillary to the fact that our dear May is not on the LVs at all.”

Ey blinked, laughed. “Okay, well, fair. I’d almost forgot.”

The fox gave em a strange look. “You forgot that May Then My Name was not here?”

Their partner showed up, a cup of coffee in one hand and a (far too large) thermos in the other. “Are you forgetting things again, Codrin?”

“No, no,” ey said, accepting the thermos with a frown. “Or, well, kind of. I didn’t forget that May Then My Name wasn’t here, just the ramifications of that, that True Name might not have her as a tool.”

“That is more understandable, yes,” the fox said. “Perhaps the True Name here on Castor has diverged from that on the L₅ System in that respect, perhaps not. I suspect that both are disappointed, in their own ways.”

Codrin fiddled with the thermos, ensuring that the lid was a mug when removed — two nested ones, actually — then nodded, standing. “I don’t know how many dimensions she’s thinking on, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if she had a cost-benefit analysis on losing her to Ioan.”

“I would not be surprised, no, which would mean that she has planned around that eventuality. I am sure that May Then My Name is keeping an eye on that. Do not let us keep you, though, my dear. Go for your walk. Think about something else. Enjoy the cold, build a cairn around your worries, and then return safe.”

Ey smiled, leaned down to kiss the fox between the ears, then eir other partner on the cheek. “I didn’t know that was possible, but I’ll try. Back in a bit.”

Ey made it two cairns out before caving to the desire to simply get started, and stepped over to Tycho’s field. There was a ping of amusement from Dear, to which ey replied with a guilty apology and an acknowledgement that ey’d return soon, all while waiting for eir eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness.

The next sensorium message was a gentle ping to Tycho — nothing so loaded with anxiety as the one ey’d received this morning, just an acknowledgement, a view of the stars.

A voice came from somewhere behind em. “Codrin?”

Ey whirled around to see a dim cone of red light shining on the ground, illuminating feet in a pair of well-worn boots. “Tycho? Sorry for intruding like this. I hope I’m not waking you or anything.”

“No, no. Come in. I haven’t been able to sleep since True Name left.”

There was a small click and then a ray of further red light spread out from a doorway, showing a small hut nestled within the trees. Ey let emself be guided into the door, finding a sparsely decorated room — a desk, a bed, and a massive cork board nailed to the wall, covered in at least three overlapping layers of notes.

“Thanks for having me,” ey said, sitting on the offered chair while Tycho claimed the edge of the bed. Once the door was shut, a switch shifted the red light to a normal, warm desk lamp. “I should’ve mentioned that I’d be coming over, first.”

He waved away the apology. “I knew you’d be here, though I didn’t know when?”

Codrin paused in the middle of unscrewing the lid to the thermos. “You knew?”

“True Name said you would.”

Ey frowned, finishing opening the thermos and offering Tycho one of the two mugs of coffee. “What did she say about me?”

“She didn’t talk with you?”

Ey shook eir head. “Did she say she would?”

Tycho sipped at the coffee, winced, and set the mug aside to cool. “No, she just talked as though she had, or at least that she knew you’d be working with me.”

“Of course she did,” ey murmured. “She knows me too well.”

The astronomer ground the heels of his palms against his eyes. “I feel like she knew me too well, too. We had what felt like a wonderful conversation where she offered me a job, asked me to fork to send an instance with her to keep working with her, but then quoted some bit of poetry at me and I couldn’t tell if it was a death threat or a warning or whatever. I’m still trying to recover from that.”

“I’m guessing you said yes to both the job offer and the fork?”

He nodded. “It all just sounded so normal. There didn’t seem like anything else to do.”

“Can you tell me more about both?”

“Well, she said that she a good deal about the communications and that she’d like me to come help her with the mechanics of that. She’d help me out with resources and I’d teach her about Artemis as I learned it.”

“Artemis? Is that what they’re calling the remote…ship? Vehicle?”

He nodded. “Vehicle, I think. She said they’re calling it Artemis, that I should tag my fork #Artemis, and that those on the ship were either Artemisians or Sea People, which I didn’t get.”

Codrin leaned back in the seat, thinking. “Sea People might be a reference to something from the Mythology, or it could be a reference to a theory about a marauding group of seafarers during the Bronze Age collapse. There was a bunch of talk about how this group had sacked much of the ancient near east and northern Africa, leading to the prolongation of the collapse.”

Tycho’s eyes grew wide. “Do you think that’s what she’s getting at with the reference? That these are going to be some marauders coming to mess with the LV?”

Ey shrugged. “Who knows. Probably both, honestly. Maybe there’s even some reference that we’re missing. She’s True Name, there really is no way of telling.”

Nodding, Tycho scooted back on the bed until his back was to the wall, then brought his knees up to his chest. He looked small to Codrin, somehow diminished after the events of the last…goodness, had it only been a day? Diminished, yes, and younger, though he’d always looked as though he was not yet out of his thirties in his well-groomed salt-and-pepper hair and well-kept beard.

They sat in silence for a while. Codrin could not guess what the astronomer was thinking about, though ey could see his eyes occasionally darting this way and that, as though connecting one idea to another in the air as well as in his head.

On eir part, ey began structuring the project. There would have to be the journalistic aspect of it, much closer to that of the Qoheleth project than the History, but if the conservative Odists were also involved, there’d likely also be far more observing than researching.

“Tycho,” ey said, startling him out of a reverie. “Do you know what an amanuensis is?”

“Like a recorder? Someone who takes notes?”

“Well, in part, but also someone who thinks about what they’re writing,” ey said, tapping at eir temple. “They aren’t a scribe or a court recorder, but someone there to witness and digest a conversation.”

“Like a clerk?” He grinned. “We used to have one of those for our club, who would take minutes of the meetings and such.”

Ey nodded. “Certainly closer to that than a recorder, yeah. I bring this up because that will be my job in all of this, but I think it’ll also be yours. Things like the History are all well and good, and I loved putting the work into it, but I also really enjoy doing this. I may wish that the things I get caught up in weren’t always so dramatic, but I’ll take what I can get.”

“What do you mean, it’ll be my job too?” he asked.

“Just that you will also be witnessing and thinking about this project, and then coming up with ideas related to it to be compiled into a coherent understanding. That’s why we’ll be working together, I think. I’m trained to do this work in particular, but I’ll need your help in making sense of it. I’ll experience it with you as much as I’m allowed, but you’ll have to ensure that I actually understand what’s going on.”

Tycho laughed. “Well, I’ll do my best, but it’s not like I have much experience working with Artemisians, either. I’ll help with the technical aspects as best I can, though.”

“Excellent,” Codrin said. “Thank you for that. I’ll be managing most of that, so you won’t have to worry too much about the minutiae, but I figured it’d give you a better idea of what to expect when we work together.”

He nodded.

“On that note, lets come up with a basic idea of our next steps. We mostly talked about immediate next steps, but it might be a good idea to start thinking on a larger timescale.”

“I guess. I’m assuming it’ll be pretty loose, given that we can’t guess the particulars?” He waited for Codrin to nod, then continued. “Then I guess we have a few weeks before they reach their closest approach as long as we both stay on our own heading.”

“Does that mean a few weeks before they upload?”

He shrugged. “Not necessarily. They can upload whenever they want, so long as our Ansible is on and the DMZ is ready. I don’t think it’s on, yet, though.”

“Alright. Have we received any further communications from them? Their message said that they had a similar mechanism in place. Is that something we’ll be able to use? Or even want to use?”

“No further communications that I know of,” he said. “But True Name said that all communications will be gated through her, and I don’t know if that means that I’ll be getting them or just Tycho#Artemis. Hopefully both, if you and I are to be working on this as well.”

Codrin frowned. “Well, okay.”

“As for us using their mechanism, I guess it depends on if it’s something we can reconfigure our Ansible to use, or if we will need to construct something new. If we’ll need to construct something new, then we might not be able to do so in time. Our manufactories are meant for repairs rather than construction. Theoretically they could be used for such, but I don’t know how long that’d take without someone phys-side to help.”

“And would we want to?”

“That feels like a question for True Name, not me,” he said after a long pause.

Ey finished eir coffee and replaced the cup on the cap of the thermos. “One of us will have to work up the courage to ask her, sometime. But for now, is it something you would want to do?”

“What? Upload to Artemis?” He looked startled by the question.

“Yes. If it’s possible, I mean. I figure it could just be an instance rather than completely investing, though I’d also be curious to hear your opinions on that.”

Tycho tilted his head back until it hit the wall of the hut, staring up toward the ceiling. He sat like that for a good five minutes, during which Codrin remained silent, before leaning forward to grab his cup of coffee now that it had cooled down. “Yes. I don’t know that I’d invest completely, but yes, I think I would. Would you?”

Ey smiled, though ey felt just how tired ey was as ey did so. “Perhaps. I have attachments here, though. So the Codrin who uploaded — if ey remains a Codrin — would be severed completely from those ey loves. As romantic as the idea of sailing away on some alien spacecraft might be, it’d be painful to leave, even knowing that a Codrin remained.”

“And if your partners uploaded with you?”

The thought caught em up short, and several trains of thought crunched to a halt within em. “If they…” Ey laughed, shaking eir head. “You know, I hadn’t considered that, yet. I wonder why? But yes, if they chose to do so, then yes, I’ll go with them.”

The conversation wound on from there, picking apart a few possible next steps that lay ahead of them, but throughout it all, at least one thread of eir mind was dedicated to picking at that question.

Why had ey not considered whether or not Dear and its partner would want to upload? It wasn’t as though ey didn’t attribute the agency to do so to them, ey knew just how independent and intelligent they were on their own. Nor was it that ey hadn’t made any guesses as to whether or not they would — ey suspected that Dear would jump at the opportunity.

The root of the issue lay within emself, ey knew. Why was ey not able to make that decision without them doing so first? Was ey really such a follower? Or, to put it in a way that was more kind to emself, was ey really so stuck living five minutes behind them that ey couldn’t imagine making the decision in the face of the possibility of simply reacting to it? Would ey be able to say yes or no to that question if they asked?

Would ey be able to argue one way or the other, to convince them to come with em or not?