Chapter 10
We were carrying a small team of biologists with us on that first trip to Adjumir.
They huddled together in their quarters as we entered arcspace, teeth gritted and backs braced.
They were waiting – waiting for the sounds of scuttling on the hull, the whispers of unknown voices, the clatter of something moving in the hall, the deepening of the shadows, the bending in and back upon itself of blackened corners and creeping time.
Instead: nothing.
We entered arcspace, and a little while later – it was always hard to judge these things – we left, arriving at our destination precisely on schedule and where planned.
No minds were broken, no horrors glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.
Were it not for the slight shift in gravitational forces on the slip from one world to another, there was not a sign that we had travelled at all.
It is always this way when I fly. It is one of the first things I learned about myself, after they pulled me from the bloody halls of the MSV Myrmida, and none of my passengers would look at me as we began our descent into the atmosphere of Adjumir.
The biologists were on Adjumir to collect bio-samples for the terraforming of Adjapar.
Even before the arrival of the Slow, Adjumiri planners had not been oblivious to the danger Lhonoja posed to their planet and had begun terraforming Adjapar centuries prior.
The onset of Exodus had stepped up the urgency of the project, but even with the Slow’s advice, you could only work so fast. Cyanobacteria needed time to divide and die; great blooms of algae had to swell and perish across Adjapar’s young oceans.
After that, the ecologists would really get going, coaxing the newborn ecosystem into something if not identical to then near enough to Adjumir for her displaced people to flourish.
“Cave moulds,” declared the short, herb-chewing dock command in aer grubby apron and boots. “That one there is a bacterial shit. Don’t ask me anything more about it – all I know is that some bacteria did a shit in a cave, and now it’s my problem.”
First impressions of Adjumir:
Voices too loud; everyone seems to be shouting.
Adjumir’s gravity is slightly higher than I am used to, and I am already beginning to feel physically weary from the extra weight.
The higher air pressure results in increased lung capacity in the local population and a deeper, booming quality of speech that has an underwater feeling to my exhausted ears.
Expressions are big, demonstrative, the humour makes constant references to things I do not understand – “Ah, did not so-and-so say we should strive?” or “They said they voted for so-and-so because of the trousers!” followed by profound, too-loud guffawing.
The air smells at once familiar and different.
Familiar – the salt-burned scent of the Emni, the spaceport stinks of lubricants and reactor fuels and still-rosy heat shields.
Different – not merely the wetness of the thick forest all around, but a taste in the atmosphere, a sort of tongue-stinging, nose-itching otherness that scholars have attempted to explain as microscopic differences in atmospheric sulphur, or perhaps ozone, or maybe just nitrogen content, but which no one can quite agree on, given the subjectivity of taste.
As with all worlds, the stars were wrong. Beautiful, and wrong. I try to work out which one is Lhonoja, only to later learn I am in the wrong hemisphere at the wrong time of year to spot it.
I was still woozy from my immunisations, though suspected that was mostly because the biologists I had been transporting had all agreed that the immunisations would feel dreadful, and thus they were.
I wore a light exoskeleton over my flight suit to support me in this new gravity, but even so had to sit down every now and then to catch my breath.
All around, people bustled; port techs and drone captains, dockers and ecologists bickering over their wares.
Someone was already trying to load a tree into the Emni, root system still intact, branches lovingly twined in netting.
Someone else had a single glass vial, the most important vial on the planet, they said – the DNA contained within this will stabilise Adjapar’s biological transition – are you listening? This is our future!
I sat on a crate. I had no idea what was in it, probably something priceless – everything becomes priceless when the alternative is obliteration – and watched.
My duties were technically discharged. I had Piloted the ship through arcspace, and none of my passengers had become convinced they were blind when they could see, or become infested with a song that only they could hear. Hadja had been almost disappointed.
“It would have been a tragedy for disaster to occur,” qe primly declared. “But it would have been most interesting.”
Now I was surplus to requirements, an off-worlder with the relentless runny nose you always get when you come to a new planet, immunisations or no.
Soft drizzle blew in, warm and light and all-penetrating.
I had done the requisite crash course in Assembly Adjumiri, the business dialect used in all diplomatic and governmental matters, but the accent of the dockers was something different, thicker, harder to tune my ears to.
I had nine days on the surface of the planet before our scheduled departure.
Traditionally Adjumiris put up guests in a nearby hostel, sometimes organised day trips.
A whole diplomatic service existed for the express purpose of welcoming and indulging visitors to the planet, on the basis that anyone foolish enough to come to a dying world to assist was an asset worth courting.
Come, they would say, come. Look at all the lives you could help save if you keep on aiding us. Look at the children running in the streets. Form emotional bonds with us; come, come!
There was no hostel booked for me. The local ecologists had the decency to look embarrassed when they found out – they had rooms booked and “scientific” excursions scheduled. But the Major had said that I should sleep on the ship, and when she had explained why, no one had questioned it.
Then a voice said: “Are you in charge?” It took me a moment to process the words – another unfamiliar accent, and the phrase te used was “the lookout above”, which I struggled to recontextualise into a Normspeak “in charge”.
“Are you in charge?” te repeated, a little slower, a little clearer, impatience flashing across ter face at my dullard’s wit.
“No,” I replied, and pointed towards the scientist who’d made themselves most noisome. “They are.”
Ter face flickered with something I thought was almost disgust, and it took me a moment to realise why. Pointing with anything, let alone a finger, was the height of rudeness on Adjumir, and though I was an off-worlder, the instinct of indignation was set deep.
I curled my fingers back into my fist, tried to be a little smaller, a little less of a presence on the pad.
“They are a botanist,” te declared. “I tried to explain things to them earlier. They were rude. Perhaps they did not understand.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
“You are not ‘sorry’. That is not the ‘sorry’ you mean,” te retorted. “You used the sorry of taking responsibility – of saying it is your fault. Rather you regret that. The regret of empathy without commitment. That is how we say things here. Unless, of course, you are to blame.”
“I would not have you think I am.”
“That is not quite the same as saying you are not.” For a moment longer te regarded the guilty botanist – the one who, unfathomably, did not understand.
Then te clicked ter tongue in the roof of ter mouth, twice – a sign I would eventually learn to take as a catch-all negative, a thing whose meaning lay somewhere between a polite “no thank you” and an absolute “damn you all” – and turned ter attention back to me.
Two fingers went to the top of ter brow in greeting, which gesture I was at least well enough trained to mimic, and te barked: “I am Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra of the Haalo Institute. I have artefacts of vital cultural significance to load upon this vessel and have been guaranteed five by five metrics of sealed non-organic space. These pythas,” te was too polite to gesture at the assembled workers of the yard, albeit not quite polite enough to not dishonour their ancestors, “insist they have no records of this arrangement. Who do I speak with to rectify this situation?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea.”
“What is your role precisely?”
“I am the Pilot.”
This statement usually produces one of two reactions:
The flinch of fear. A recoiling. A turning away. In polite societies, a hasty withdrawal. In a few cases, immediate violence and cries for help. My quan companions are sometimes asked to protect me from others, as well as others from me.
Fascination. An almost sickly curiosity, usually giving way to sympathy.
Mumbled questions, turning into a torrent: what does darkness taste like, sound like, does it truly sing?
They ask me because soon, surely, I shall be dead, and what are the odds of meeting a seemingly sane one of me ever again?
“I am the Pilot,” I said, and waited to see which route Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra would take.
A flinch, but almost as quickly as it had come, another expression, a flicker of interest pushing through the distaste.
And as soon as these expressions were there, they were gone, and te clicked ter tongue once in ter mouth – the sound of acknowledgement, a polite affirmation – and said, as if all this were the most normal thing in the galaxy, “Well then. You must have seen someone who knows which end of the slitherjaw has fangs.”
In the end, we found the launchmaster.