Chapter 8
One hundred years after the Slow came to Tu-mdo; ninety-nine years after the MSV Myrmida entered Xihana magnetic space with its cargo of dismembered crew, the binary star system called Lhonoja exploded.
There was at first very little data on the supernova blast. The nature of the Edge – the wall of radiation ripping through the galaxy at light speed from the collapsing heart of the supernova – made observation of anything within fifty light years of the solar collapse practically impossible.
Sensors were burned to a crisp at the moment of impact, and it wouldn’t be until many years later that anyone was able to peer through the chaos of the blast back in time to the moment of destruction.
To everyone else, it seemed that Lhonoja still twinkled in the sky, the old light travelling on even though the source itself was an obliterated mass of rapidly expanding plasma.
From my little garden, far away from the core, it would be another one hundred and sixty-three years before the light of those binary stars would flare for a few dazzling weeks of daylight brightness, and then go out.
Consequently, I only found out about the supernova when Rencki, my companion, directed my attention towards a minor piece on the news informing me of the same.
“Right on schedule,” qe quipped. “Just as the Slow said.”
Rencki’s mainframe was not, as far as I was aware, one of the quanmechs who worshipped – or as near to worship as the quans came – the Slow.
As qe put it, qis mainframe was interested in its own development as an evolving operating system within the galactic Accord, and didn’t approve of leaving its fate in the hands of an unknowable god.
Qe did use the word “god”, though, when qe talked about the Slow. Qe made it sound like a job description.
Let me tell you about my garden.
I live on an island, about twenty minutes’ sedate rowing – or five minutes by motor – from the town of Poulinio, the administrative capital of the Mun peninsula.
You can walk around the island in thirty-five ticks, which is more than enough to keep me occupied every month of every season with the constant flourishing of nature.
In the east, where the land rises up to black basalt cliffs, are groves of giant courl and drooping bluebrush trees, whose sapphire blossoms stink to high heaven when they open in the wettest part of summer, but which wither to black nuts in winter that are a roasted treat, if only I can get to them before the longlaps pick the branches clean.
Away from the cool shade of the woodland, wild grasses grow, which in summer are pricked out with an explosion of yellow and white as the slumbering blossoms burst up from the gentle soil below.
In the north, a shingle beach faces the sea, and the prevailing winds bend back the branches of spiny thorn-break and thick-bellied succulents that seem impervious to salt, while inland I tend a long lawn where I sometimes welcome what few visitors I have in the summer months with feasts of fruit grown from the southern orchard and fish caught with hook and line – actual hook and actual line! – from the side of my little boat.
I do not get enough visitors to really justify the labour I put into keeping the lawn in this state, but after a while I found the challenge almost as important as the result, so keep on labouring.
Around my cottage I grow vegetables and the more tender fruits that would not survive a winter’s blast. My most successful crop is a form of saltscar-rui, which I’ve been permitted to enter into the local farmers’ competition and once won second prize for flavour and consistency.
Bursting with pride, I did not admit that I wasn’t a fan of the extremely bitter taste.
When I arrived, nearly thirty years before Lhonoja went supernova, the freshwater well behind the cottage was just that – a hole in the ground with an electric pump sitting square and ugly by its side.
I consulted with a hydrologist and eventually managed to turn the whole area around the mouth of the well into a trickling water garden where lush moss bloomed.
The solar roof provided more than enough electricity to run everything I desired, though after one particularly bad storm I’d gone two days by candlelight when it turned out that the backup battery had been corroded by salt and I didn’t have the parts to coax it back to life.
My companion back then had been a quan called Bi, who took very badly to the blackout, growing steadily more tetchy as qis internal power declined.
“Pain is an alarm – an evolutionarily useful alarm. It warns us when we are in danger. I have experienced low-power shutdown before and know the dangers it entails. My system warns me that I may shut down, and so I experience pain!” qe barked.
“How much charge do you have left?”
“Forty-eight per cent.”
“That seems like quite a lot, given your average consumption.”
“I have set my threshold for alarm very high! You do not understand my predictions!”
Bi had only stayed with me for ten months, and I had not been disappointed when qe declared that qe had gathered all the data qe required and would be departing in the morning.
Rencki assured me that qe only started experiencing alarm signals at 20 per cent battery, and that qe would inform me before shutting down the parts of qis processor that handled interactions involving such things as courtesy, empathy and goodwill.
“Although,” qe mused, “if Bi’s armaments consumed significant power on discharge, I can see why qe set qis alarm threshold so high.”
I did not ask Rencki how much qis armaments consumed, when fired. I knew that each of qis three furry tails concealed weapon pylons, and at least one was lethal. Asking seemed impertinent, and might have given the wrong impression regarding my intentions.
This then is how I lived, surrounded by the seasons and the changing life of the island.
When I had first come to this place, I had been firmly but politely told that if I wished to leave it, I must inform local authorities.
A boat would be sent; escort provided. The whole thing was very formal, very bureaucratic – the Xi do love their bureaucracy – and though the Xi sometimes called upon my very specialist services, generally speaking it was suggested that everyone would have a far easier time if I stayed put.
A series of officers of middling rank had been instructed to keep an eye on me, of whom the latest, Major Phrawon, was a relief from her stand-offish predecessors.
She visited my island at least once a month, usually brought pie, sometimes a junior officer or a visiting researcher, who would avoid all eye contact and mumble awkwardly, my paper – fascinating project – don’t want to inconvenience, before finally the Major would blurt: “Just ask him if he’ll give you some blood! ”
I always said yes, though I suspected by now that there was more of my blood in various vaults and archives than actually in my body.
“Oh!” one especially oblivious captain had exclaimed as I sliced pie into perfect sixths, served on a green stoneware plate. “I hadn’t expected it to eat!”
“We do not call Maw ‘it’,” Phrawon breathed in the soft voice of the ocean as it pulls back before the tsunami. “It is unacceptable to address a person that way; perhaps even unwise. You will apologise.”
The officer apologised, I do not know whether through courtesy or terror.
I didn’t have many visitors. Old Yulin was an exception, bumbling onto my shore after their boat was caught in an unexpected squall.
“They told me a Pilot lived here!” they exclaimed as I helped drag their ship up the shingle, rain tapping furious on our coats, feet sloshing in choppy, biting swell. “Said you were quite, quite mad!”
“I am a Pilot,” I admitted. “But I think ‘mad’ is an oversimplification of the problem.”
Yulin held a few firm beliefs. If one person helped another; if they shared their words, their warmth, their food, listened attentively and spoke no evil, then Yulin didn’t give a damn what the military had to say.
“If you were really a monster of the unending dark, I’m sure someone would have killed you before now,” they exclaimed.
“That’s part of the problem,” I replied. “I’m not that easy to kill.”
When, after twelve years of friendship, Yulin’s lungs finally packed up, I found the reality of it…
… hazy.
A hazy kind of truth, a coming-in-and-going-out of possibilities, of could-not-be, of shadow and dark.
The human brain is very poor at understanding absence; nothingness is far more infinite in its possibility than solid, short-lived life.
My quan companion at the time reported my confusion to the Major, who imposed an actual quarantine around the island, enforced with gunboats, until such time as I had had a chance to process the death of my friend, understand that it was real.
“Maw?” she asked, down the commnet. “Are you stable? Are you safe?”
Grief seemed to me like a thing I should be able to acknowledge, and in acknowledging, be done with it. Strange, how it lingered.
“I am safe,” I said. “I am… I walk in brightly lit places.”
I was eventually allowed to go to Yulin’s sky-casting, say a few words, and they had clearly briefed their family on how to behave before they died, because several touched me on the lips in familial greeting and looked me in the eye when we spoke and seemed to be unafraid.
I was so grateful then to my dead friend that I nearly dissolved once again, and had to flee back to the boat, to the safety of isolation, before the feeling broke me.
I had not made many new friends since.
And sometimes the Xi would ask me to fly.
Thus, eleven years before Lhonoja went supernova, the Major came to my door.
“I cannot give you orders,” she sighed as we sat on the porch outside my cottage drinking cornwhite tea, “because you are a Xi citizen and I have no jurisdiction over you.”
The Major’s thick, curly hair was growing out beyond its usual military cut; her formal uniform swapped for a plain blue shirt and sensible brown shoes.
On the few occasions she smiled, her whole face seemed to lift, from a suddenly appearing chin to rising round cheeks to eyebrows that swelled up towards her hairline.
Most of the time she did not smile, and thus her features seemed to wait in soft restfulness, contours camouflaged beneath sea-pale skin.
“But you still have orders,” I declared.
This was not a question. I have no time for the dance that people do, the darting around a subject.
It seems to make most people happy, give them a run-up to a difficult topic.
With Phrawon, though she still danced the dance, as clearly she felt she had to, obfuscation just added to her exasperation.
It was one of the things I liked about her.
She blew steam off the top of her mug, and clearly had no intention of drinking it.
“I think it is madness that the authorities ask you to Pilot. Utter madness. But I read the reports on the Mistral Spring when she went astray. They say you walked into the places on that ship where all noise had ceased, through the black that light could not penetrate, and you sat in the Pilot’s chair and guided it home.
They say that when the Seed of Dawn’s Embrace set out for a new world and tumbled eighty thousand light years off course, you were the only Pilot who could bring it back, the only one who could interface with the chair.
There were seven hundred thousand souls on that ship, too many to risk losing on a vessel that is clearly already arc-touched, so let’s use Mawukana-of-the-Isles, Mawukana-from-the-Dark. So here we are. There it is.”
The Xi, when they acknowledge a thing as true, touch thumb and middle finger together.
Disaster if you get it wrong, thumb-to-index or worse, thumb-to-little-finger while in polite company.
But having learned it, it was a gesture I enjoyed, a non-committal acknowledgement, a silence that left space, offered closure – whatever it was that the other person wanted.
A while, then, we sat in silence, the Major and I.
“The Xi are sending ships to Adjumir,” she said. “It is the first planet that will be hit by the blast when Lhonoja goes, barely seven light years out from the nova. We have dispatched colony ships to aid with human cargo, but we are not… nimble.”
“You want me to fly one? A colony ship, to Adjumir?”
“Sea and sky, no! Can you imagine trying to explain to the Adjumiris what manner of Pilot we are entrusting their people to? No. Support mission only. Artefacts of historical import, biological security – that kind of thing. Show willing. Lend a helping hand. A smaller vessel – it would be inefficient to swap out the Pilot every single flight, it would slow the process to a crawl, and so…”
A loose tapping of fingers, a raising of hand to the ever-expansive wind.
“You will take a quan companion, of course,” she added. “For safety.”
“Of course.”
She did not say whose safety was the concern.
That is how I first went to Adjumir.