Tycho Brahe#Artemis — 2346

Convergence T-minus 19 days, 6 hours, 58 minutes

The dream repeated each night.

As always, the hallway continued however many miles dream-logic determined it must, and as before, he kept walking down it, kept walking and walking and walking, right hand always trailing along the wall. That wall was of smooth stone, something coarser than marble and smoother than concrete, and as he felt it play out beneath his fingers, he heard the voices ahead of him.

There was a room, there ahead of him. He could see the light spilling into the comparatively dim hallway. Sunlight, cool and bright. He could see that the left-hand wall of the hallway continued. A corner, then, the hallway dumping him out into the southeast corner of the room.

Southeast…how did he know that?

There on that wall, shadows played. Shadows of leaves, the arc of a fountain.

And in that room, that soft rush of water only served to muffle the voices of so many others. They had to be the Artemisians. They had to be. But the water was just loud enough, added just enough white noise, that he could pick out no singular detail. There were fricatives. There were plosives. There were sibilants.

And the harder he listened, the more details he almost-but-not-quite heard. First there was the sound of a masculine voice, and then the sound of something more feminine. First there was the careful modulation of some machine-produced voice, then the melodious tones of something undeniably organic.

And he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be somewhere else. He wasn’t allowed. He wasn’t permitted. He was supposed to be somewhere different, not creeping along the unending right-hand wall of the hallway, straining to hear yet more detail from a group of incomprehensible others.

And still he crept along. Still he strained to hear, still he stared at that wall, hoping for the barest glimpse of the smallest shadow, hoping to discern the shape of the unknown.

And then a silence fell among the voices.

And then he turned the corner.

And then he was blinded by the sun.

And then he awoke, the lights of the room staring down at him reprovingly.

The dream always seemed determined to cling to him, as it had the day before and the day before that, and even as he showered and dressed, even after True Name once more met him at his door and handed him his coffee, he tried as hard as he could to remember even the smallest detail of those voices.

“You seem distracted today,” the skunk observed. “Not just tired. What is on your mind?”

He jolted to awareness and smiled sheepishly to her. “Uh, just a dream sticking with me from last night. Third night in a row I’ve dreamed about them.”

“The Artemisians?”

He nodded. “It’s like I can hear them talking, but not any details about them. I can hear that they’re talking, I guess. I keep trying to learn more and then I wake up.”

True Name smiled. “I know the feeling, yes. It is that desire to know more, yet having it kept from you. Are you dreaming in their language or in English?”

“I can’t even tell that. Sometimes I think it might be one and then some little phrase sounds like an accented version of the other. I wouldn’t be surprised, though. I’ve been learning as much of that as I can during the day.”

“I imagine so, yes. Would you like a small break from language acquisition? If you are having dreams about them, perhaps you can come up with some specific questions and we can send them a message.” She patted him on the arm. “Time-boxed, of course, but it may give you a chance to come up with some ideas that we have not.”

“Really? You’d let me do that?”

She laughed, nodded. “Of course, Tycho. You are always welcome to ask to do something other than what you are. We would request that you fork to do so. However, since this is not your area of expertise, I am sure that Answers Will Not Help will be willing to give you, say, two hours to work on something else if it will also serve to increase our knowledge of the situation. One moment, please.”

There was a moment of silence as True Name stood at the entrance to the central work area, sipping — or, well, lapping at — her coffee. After a moment, Answers Will Not Help showed up before her.

“Morning, dear,” she said. “Everything alright?”

“Tycho would like to take a few hours to work on a message to the Artemisians. Are you alright with that?”

Answers Will Not Help laughed and nodded. “Oh, by all means. We will get by without him for a bit. See you at lunch, Dr. Brahe?”

He nodded.

After a minute or two, another woman stepped into the sim, looking almost-but-not-quite identical to Answers Will Not Help. Perhaps a long-lived fork? The ebullience was toned down somewhat. Still the same grin — but kinder. Still the casual dress — but more of a weekend outfit. “Tycho Brahe, yes? True Name says I will be helping you out on writing a letter.”

“Oh, uh,” he frowned. “I guess so. Answers Will Not Help?”

She waved her hand in a non-answer, instead beckoning him over to another door along the wall. “Come on. Let us get this going. I am excited to hear what you come up with.”

True Name raised her coffee cup to him and smiled. “Good luck, Tycho. Do keep in touch.”

The office was much smaller than the conference room where he’d initially met Sovanna and Dr. Verda. They sat on opposite sides of a desk, where the Odist swiped two notepads and two pens into existence. “Alright, so I have been told that you had a dream. Tell me about it.”

As he did, she jotted down details on her own notepads, occasionally asking him questions — do you remember what the air smelled like? Were there human voices as well? Why were you anxious about being found out? — and though it felt silly at first, he realized that she had teased out greater details of what it was that his dreaming mind was curious about.

“Alright,” she said. “Let us come up with five questions out of this. They seem to like the number five.”

“Hmm…if you think that we can do one paragraph per question, perhaps we can ask about whether there are common areas that have a lingua franca, too. I think we have how often do the four races interact? already.”

She shrugged as he wrote down the question. “I do not see why not. We are not limited on bandwidth. I would also like to know if they have similar strategies of forking, if they even have such. As part of that, we can ask about clade structures and naming, given the implications of both Turun Ka and Turun Ko.”

He took a moment to write this down, as well as a few other sub-questions she mentioned along the way.

“What else do you think would be helpful?”

“Well, there’s lots I want to know, but since we only have so much time before the talks begin, I guess we should keep it relatively short.”

She nodded.

“What about when each of the races joined? That would give us an idea of how long they’ve been traveling.”

“Good one.” She grinned, tapping her pen against the table. “I knew we kept you around for a reason.”

Had she said it in any other tone of voice, had all these Odists not been so good at choosing his responses for him, it could have easily come off as insulting, but it was said with such obvious affection that he laughed. Something about her was ever-so-slightly different from Answers Will Not Help, though he couldn’t put his finger on what. She was more earnest, perhaps. More focused on making him feel good rather than only seeming always on the edge of laughter. Perhaps this was the Why Ask Questions who would be among the delegates, the one who had eaten with Tycho#Tasker.

And yet she’d not given her name, and so he was forced to consider the ’long-lived fork’ scenario.

This is why I’m a tasker, ey thought. I’ll never understand clades.

“Should we also ask where they came from?” she continued.

He frowned. “I don’t know about that one. It can be a very involved answer until we share more knowledge, and who knows, maybe even touchy. Perhaps a separate set of questions for science down the line, since those will take them more time to come up with. Maybe we can come up with a list of questions to have them prepare answers for at the conference.”

“Oh! Wonderful idea!” She paused, likely sending off a note to one of her cocladists. “We will tackle that at a separate time. I agree with you, though, that keeping this to more cultural and social topics will help. We can offer similar in return. Let us ask about leisure activities, then. What kind of stories do they tell? How do they tell them? Is storytelling limited to certain individuals, or considered a skilled trade? Is there a concept of work to make leisure time important?”

Tycho scribbled the rapid fire questions down on the pad, nodding as he did. Once he was finished, he said, “That got me thinking of another question, but I’m not sure how well it fits, so feel free to poke holes in it. How do you feel about asking if they dream?”

She laughed delightedly and clapped her hands. “Oh, I absolutely love it, my dear. I only have one request of you.”

“Yes?”

“That must be the entire question. We can expand on the others with our little sub-questions and a paragraph of why we are asking them, but for this last one, it must be the only three words that they read pertaining to it. “Do you dream?””

He blinked, tilting his head. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I fucking am,” she said, grinning widely. “I am the politician, you are the nerd. Now, let us hammer out some answers to these questions for ourselves that we can send. Answers to the first four, I mean. We will not answer ‘Do you dream?’ for ourselves.”

Tycho stopped himself from asking why, realizing she would likely answer in the same way. “Alright, then. This is fun, thanks for giving me the chance to work on it.”

“Of course, of course.” She giggled, leaning across the table to ruffle his graying hair. “You fucking taskers, you need breaks, too.”

He laughed, struggling to re-comb his hair with only his fingers, once more surprised at just how comfortable she made him feel. He liked her, whoever she was.