Tavesh

Half an hour of the instrumentation arguing with itself over connotation is, to everyone else in the Halyx Relay Station's liaison office, the channel's defect. To Tavesh it is the channel working.

Tavesh keeps the translation channel between the Halyx Relay Station and Meridian's reef-cities: the instrumentation that renders the Meridian people's claw-percussion and slow chemical signalling into language a Cerebraun can read, and sends Hegemony language back the other way. The office of Administrator-Voice Sohrel maintains it, in the record's own words, mostly out of obligation, and rarely trusts it past a paragraph. Somebody maintains it. Tavesh is that somebody, and has been for long enough to have an opinion about what the half-hour is for.

Known History

• Posted to the Halyx System liaison office aboard the Halyx Relay Station, on the Administrator-Voice's staff, with the chemical-and-percussion translation channel as the standing duty. When the posting began, and what Tavesh did before it, the record has not established.
• Keeps the channel through which, in 2828 UCSD, the Long Shelf reef-city's own council sent its petition to be consulted on the Sentinel — the fifth request Sohrel received and the first from outside the Hegemony (What Meridian Asked). The chapter names the channel and not its keeper; who was on duty when the petition came through, and what the keeper made of the clause the council insisted be carried in its exact shape, the record does not hold.
• Has never held an Administrator-Voice's portfolio, or any office with a signature on it. Tavesh's work goes out under the office's seal and under nobody's name.

Character Notes

The Hegemony's doctrine is one voice and limbs that execute it, and the channel Tavesh keeps has no one voice in it at all. Meridian's people speak on two channels at once, percussion that carries at range and a chemical signal that drifts in slowly after it, and the instrumentation's half-hour is the time it takes to decide which of the two a given sentence is leaning on. A smooth Hegemony paraphrase can be had in a minute. Tavesh has learned to distrust the minute. The paraphrase is the version with the argument taken out, and the argument, in Tavesh's experience, is where the reef-cities keep what they actually mean. When the Long Shelf's council insisted that its clause on its own account and no other's cross the channel in its exact shape rather than a smoother rendering, it was asking the instrumentation to do the slow thing on purpose. Tavesh regards that as the council understanding the channel better than most of the office does.

A Cerebraun speaks on two channels too, and Tavesh is a Cerebraun on a station where humans also work and almost nobody reads skin. The record does not say whether Tavesh has ever set the two facts side by side. It notes only that the keeper of a two-channel people's channel is a two-channel person whose own second channel lands, most days, on nobody, and that Tavesh keeps the instrumentation's connotation log, the long record of every sentence it argued over and how the argument went, with a care the office has never asked for and has never told Tavesh to stop.

Colleagues who have worked the liaison office describe Tavesh as easy to read and hard to predict, which for a Cerebraun is nearly a contradiction. The display is open: Tavesh's skin says what the limb-ganglia think of a sentence as it comes through, and anyone in the office trained to read the formal display-language can follow it. What they cannot follow is which of Tavesh's nine centres is weighted heaviest on any given day, because Tavesh, unusually, does not seem to settle the question before speaking. Three-part answers, seconds apart, are the species' ordinary habit. Tavesh's arrive in the order the centres finished thinking, and the office has stopped expecting the central brain's part to come first.

On the question the Halyx liaison office has carried since 2828, whether the Sentinel's pulse and Meridian's percussion are connected, Tavesh has no position on the record. The comparison the Long Shelf's analysts ran found resemblance and not authorship, and the channel carried the finding back in both directions without, for once, needing the half-hour. Tavesh is recorded as having said that this was the first sentence in three centuries the instrumentation had nothing to argue about, and as having said nothing else.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Tavesh's home world and age, which, as for every Cerebraun, the record leaves unnamed; how long the posting has run; whether Tavesh has ever been to Meridian's surface or met a Meridian person otherwise than through the channel; what Tavesh's own display showed when the fifth petition came through; and whether the Administrator-Voice reads the connotation log. The Cerebraun have no pronoun system on the record, and the usage of the three Sohrel chapters, the name throughout and no pronoun, is kept here. Tavesh is the record's second Cerebraun by name, and the first who holds no office.

See also: Cerebraun, The Cerebraun Hegemony, Sohrel, Meridian, Sixth Course, The Sentinel, What Meridian Asked (S03E01C03).