Eda Hamebe

Role: Retired empire causations mathematician — specialty “vaguely related to quiet chamber technology and causations.” Great-great-niece of The Ertian Surgeon. Affiliation: Formerly the empire science division; now a private smallholder in Winchester on Aerth. Era: Late empire; many years after the Vasily Incident.

Summary

A woman “in her fifties,” implant-free (rare on late-empire Aerth), living in an ancient stone house on a farm in Winchester with her husband — also implant-free — and their daughter Ansra. She speaks Galactic Standard perfectly; her husband’s Anglish is his first language. Eda has left the science division and does not intend to return to mathematics. She chose family over the quiet-chamber work despite being qualified to work at the edge of Causations research.

She is also the named beneficiary of Tabitha Dimitrova’s old threat against The Ertian Surgeon — when the surgeon topolog’s back to Aerth to visit her as his only known living family, the reader already knows the empire once considered her leverage against him. The threat never materialised.

Over dinner, Eda is the one who connects the dots for the surgeon. She tells him that the sphere that holed the Vasily contained a dictionary — decoded from three-dimensional-binary holographic nanoparticles by a leaked Rosance-division paper — and that “some clever folk are using it to build new tech. Trying at least. Maybe one day they’ll crack transmitting messages along the timeline and use it to send the dictionary itself back. A loop in a loop in a loop…” Her judgement is the line that closes the story: “That dictionary is going to change things, really change things. Soon.”

She is also the one who gently tells him his first wife Henrietta remarried and died two centuries ago, and then offers to take him to the grave in the morning.

Appearances

• Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Host, guide, family.

Related

• The Ertian Surgeon — her great-great-uncle.
• Tabitha Dimitrova — once threatened her by name.
• The Dictionary, Causations, Hypergeometric Quiet Chamber
• Aerth, Winchester

Open questions

• Why did she leave the empire science division? “Start a family” is stated; anything more is not.
• Was her causations research adjacent to the Retrounification definition in the dictionary? The line about “a loop in a loop in a loop” hints that this is her professional hobbyhorse.
• Did she ever become the “family” Dimitrova threatened, or is she safe because the leak made the threat moot?