Chapter 4 #2
Perhaps this was what the Slow intended all along. After all, qe came with a message, when qe could have said nothing at all.
I did not take part in the riots.
I hid in my room, with the window shuttered and door locked.
Even though there was an airspace suspension, I was meant to go to work, and was fined when I did not.
I tried to get a medical certificate to exempt me, but the doctor’s prices were higher than the penalty.
Eventually I risked the two-hour walk across the city to the control tower, complete with blanket and pillow so I could sleep on the office floor, but just as I arrived, a strict stay-at-home policy was imposed, fining anyone caught outside their residence, even for medical emergencies.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That is the Venture way.
So I crawled home in the dark, and to distract myself from the mixture of rage and silence in the streets, I read.
Here: the green-nosed biscuit shark. It is functionally deaf, blind, but its electromagnetic senses are so good it can detect the slightest flutter of a creature up to twenty kils away, and is sent into a frenzy by any boats that come too near, driven mad by the howl of its electrics.
It migrates every year from pole to pole in a perfect straight line, following the magnetic currents of the world.
(Gunfire outside; someone calling for help. I put my hands over my ears, keep on reading.)
The aka-aka, many-legged and furry-backed, who build their cities deep in the dust of their home world, and whose spaceships resemble nothing so much as the great organic insect hives from which they came, and who communicate by touch and dance and are known to occasionally eat their dead when times are hard, having digestive systems that are more than capable of breaking down any questionable proteins that might be transmitted by the act, and who have no words for “peace” or “war”, merely “being” and “un-being”, the latter of which is the closest they come to expressing the grotesque violation, the unbearable insult of violence committed against another, which must be punished no matter what by un-being rendered in kind, since consequences, the aka-aka proclaim, are the only way people ever learn.
(The calls for help are silenced. Somewhere, something distant goes whomp whomp whomp. It sounds like flames. I didn’t know that flames could make that kind of sound, but it seems right, somehow, seems like a kind of burning.)
About the universal vulture, a catch-all term for the tendency of carrion birds to evolve in basically every biome of every world.
Most terraforming programmes introduce vultures or creatures like them to help accelerate decomposition within the system.
Where they do not, vultures soon emerge anyway, no matter the density of atmosphere through which they float, no matter the meat upon which they feed. Evolution loves a vulture.
(When people do not understand you, and you do not understand people, you must find your beauty and your joy elsewhere.)
I do not know how near the gunfire came.
I did not know if anyone was “winning” or “losing” or what that might entail.
On the second day, the commnet was completely blacked out.
I ate dried food from a foil packet and did not answer the door when my neighbour, Elder Zi, started wailing, because it sounded like she needed help.
In the Shine, you left the weak behind. That habit had stayed embedded in our society long after we achieved abundance, enriched with words such as “strong”, “independent” and “resilient”.
So for a day and a night I listened to an old woman cry, until she cried no more.
On the third day, Special Operations bombed the city.
They gave no warning, sounded no alarms.
I woke to the end of the world, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t the end of the world, but the End of the World, the promised death by binary star, arriving one hundred and seventy-nine years ahead of schedule.
My room shook and the windows shattered and the noise…
It was not that it was loud, merely relentless, a shock that lingered in the mind long after the ringing outside had ceased.
I felt lonely more than I felt afraid. Apart from my parents, who loved me more than they liked me, I could not think of anyone who would especially miss me.
My life would come and go, and the only record of its existence would be the debt I had left upon it – 57,423 Glint, a sum that had been swelling and shrinking since the moment of my birth.
Covered by the noise of the bombings, I allowed myself to howl, to shake my fists and produce all manner of implausible, strange noises from the back of my throat.
Still here, I screamed. I’m still here! I’m still here!
When the bombing stopped, there were fires.
My building was still standing, but two doors down a block was burning.
I staggered out into the crimson dark and joined a chain dragging buckets from a broken pipe in the street to throw water not on the building, but on its neighbours, the people of Glastya Row briefly united in protecting what property they had.
By the time the sun rose, I was a filthy shadow sitting beneath the scars of my home.
I thought of my parents and their shop, but in the broken-toothed landscape it was hard to orientate, to work out which way was north, south, up or down.
Familiar landmarks were gone, and as I tried to stumble through the ruins of the city, I kept spinning round and round, the bodies of strangers in the street becoming a more distinct landmark than broken buildings I had known my whole life.
In the end, I stumbled into Corporate Security Services.
Antekeda Venture had drafted in operatives from Halsect and Blue Land to assist the local forces. When I saw them, I felt relief, staggered towards them with arms open and mouth wide, thinking they were here to help, to help me, please, help!
I don’t know what they communicated with each other behind their faceless white helmets, but I imagine it was something along the lines of “here’s another one”, because they shot me without warning.