Hassipura had made its home in a tall, jagged outcrop of dark rocks that stuck out above the white waste of the salt desert like a diseased tooth. Through the machine’s efforts over the centuries, the place had become a dry little paradise of directed cause and effect, an oasis of minutely ordered motion and an arid image of a water garden.
“I thought drones, like Minds, remembered everything,” Tefwe said.
“Well, we don’t.” There was a pause before it said, “Well, I don’t.”
Tefwe and the drone were at the foot of the outcrop, just a vertical metre and a few shattered-looking boulders away from the surface of the desert. Tefwe was standing and Hassipura was hovering level with the woman’s head, performing some maintenance on a fragile-looking raising screw. The raising screw was powered by the fierce sunlight falling on a small semi-circular array of solar panels part-encasing its lower quarter.
“I see,” the woman said. “Do you choose what to forget, or do you just let things disappear randomly?”
“Scoaliera,” the drone said, “if I chose what to forget, I would very likely have forgotten all about you.”
The screw, one of a dozen or so at this lowest level of the rocks, was a couple of metres tall, and thin enough for Tefwe’s fingers to have met, had she grasped it one-handed. The foot of the device lay in a pool of sand about a metre across; the slowly rotating screw twisted lazily in the dark-gold grains, raising them inside a transparent collar with a hypnotic steadiness to deposit the lifted material, a minute or so later, into another pool on a higher tier of the outcrop, where a second level of raising screws and sand-wheels like pieces of giant clockwork would transport the material further up, and so on, for level after level and diminishing tier after diminishing tier until a single last raising screw, buried in a tunnel inside the dusty peak of the tor, deposited a small trickle of sand to an overflowing pool at its very summit.
“That is ungallant, and, I suspect, also not true.”
“Let us test that, shall we, should you ever come to visit me again?”
“I don’t believe you delete memories at random.”
“They are chosen at random and buffer-binned; whether they are finally deleted is a matter of choice.”
“Ah. Might have thought so.”
The drone had subtly sculpted the outcrop over the decades and centuries it had lived here, cutting channels, pools, cisterns, tunnels and reservoirs into the rock, building structures that at least resembled aqueducts and creating, had the whole complex been filled with water, what would have been a kind of secret water garden, albeit with rather steeply inclined canals and aqueducts.
But the outcrop held no water at all. Instead it was sand that moved within the tunnels and channels, sand which was lifted within the raising wheels and screws, and sand which fell in little whispering falls and moved liquidly down dry weirs.
“Whatever makes you think I’d wish to visit you again after being so roundly insulted?”
“That fact that I have insulted you just as roundly in the past to so little effect,” the drone said smoothly, “for here you are. Again.”
“You’re right. I ought to come back just to annoy you,” Tefwe said, squatting. She dipped her hand into the shaded pool where the rod of the raising screw slanted into the tawny grains. She let the sand fall back between her fingers; it slipped away almost as quickly as water would have. “It moves very smoothly,” she said, inspecting her hand. A few tiny grains adhered to her skin, all in the lines of her palm.
“Please don’t do that,” the drone said, using invisible maniple fields to adjust parts of the diamond-sheet- covered solar panels.
“Why?” Tefwe asked.
“Moisture,” Hassipura said. “And impurities such as salts. Your hands will have added a little of each to the sands.”
“Sorry.” Tefwe squatted and stuck her head down into the shade created by the solar panel, gazing at the pool of sand underneath. Inside its transparent sleeve, the turning screw seemed barely to disturb the surface of the sand, which appeared to flow in to fill even the slightest of hollows. She glanced up to see if the drone was looking, reckoned it couldn’t see, then stuck a finger into the surface of the sand pool and took it smartly out again. The sand closed up round where her finger had been — running in, again, like water — to leave no sign that its surface had been disturbed.
“Will you stop doing that?” the drone said, tiredly.
“Apologies,” Tefwe said. “How
“The grains are spheres,” the drone said, clicking something back into place on the solar array. “They are polished, individually where necessary. I call the stuff sand because it starts out as ordinary sand and still has the same chemical composition as the raw material, but really the particle size is reduced almost to that of fines, and the polishing process leaves each grain almost perfectly spherical. See.” The drone shifted in the air, humming very faintly.
Tefwe stood and straightened as a bright screen suddenly filled the air in front of her, seeming to dim a significant part of the sky and putting her in shadow. The drone had produced a holo display like a magically produced cabinet hovering in front of the woman. The holo showed two grains, highly magnified. One appeared to be about the size of Tefwe’s head, and was jagged, crystalline, all straight edges, spires and juts; not unlike the rocky outcrop itself. It was rainbowed with diffraction colours. The other was pebble-sized, a glass-like shiny blonde and seemingly a perfect sphere.
“Before and after,” the drone said, shutting the screen off and letting the blast of sunlight fall upon Tefwe again. Her eyes adjusted, putting a black dot over the sun to reduce the glare. The sunlight was so strong her vision would have been affected by light coming in through the surrounds of her eyes, so they would be partially silvering, she suspected. Something similar had happened to areas of her skin, again to cope with the ferocity of the sun’s glare.
“You polish them all individually?” she asked.
“I have processes, machinery to do the gross polishing,” the drone told her. “Then they are all inspected individually, by me. Any further polishing that is required I do myself.”
“That seems obsessive.”
“Meticulous care can seem so to those unwilling to recognise it for its true worth.”
“I meant you might simply discard the rejects.”
Hassipura gave the appearance of thinking about this. “That I would find offensive,” it said eventually.
“What a strange machine you are,” Tefwe told it.
“That is why I make my home here in the centre of a city in the midst of my dear fellow drones and so many, many delightfully gregarious humans.”
“Is this really all you do?” she asked, gazing round the network of sand-canals, sandfalls, sand weirs, pools, lakes and whirlpools. She wanted to call the dry, canted bridges aqueducts, but couldn’t. Silicaducts, maybe.
“Yes. Do you find it in some way inadequate?”
“No, it’s beautiful in a way. You really have no water at all?”
“None. Why should I have water? I have no need for it, nor does the sandstream complex. Water makes paste and mud. Water clogs and makes the complex stop working. Here, water is a pollutant.”
“Does it rain often here?”
“Almost never, thankfully.”
“Still, shouldn’t you have some water for guests, for visitors?”
“I try to discourage visitors.”
“What about weary travellers? Or what if some poor devil comes crawling across the sands, croaking for water?”
“Having lost their terminal, so unable to call Hub or anywhere else for help?”
“For the sake of argument.”
“Then
“Not really, but I think the aphore is.”
“You should have brought more water.”
“I still have some. I’ll let it drink shortly.”
“You came from Chyan’tya?”
