Chapter 11
Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra did eventually get ter goods onto the Emni. The instant they were loaded, te seemed to deflate, started muttering: “Well yes, yes, I suppose mushrooms are important too…”
I had followed ter around in fascinated silence, and now the weight of Adjumiri gravity was really starting to drag, and I sat breathless on the edge of my ship while te looked at me askance and said: “You come from somewhere a little less massy, I take it?”
Sometimes, when I am tired, my leg aches.
It is the leg that was broken, back in the fires of Hasha-to.
When the quarantine team found me on the Myrmida, my leg was healed as if it had never snapped, but not quite right.
Maybe it’s just memories, a ghost of pain that has no other way of being processed. Maybe it’s not that at all.
Then Gebre blurted: “Thank you, by the way.” And, because te was struggling to say these words, struggling to know how to thank a stranger for showing the bare minimum of kindness, the absolute basic nothing of decency, added: “For coming to Adjumir. You’d be astonished how many people just look at us and go, ‘Well, the problem is too big, no point trying.’ Some diplomat should be saying all this to you, of course.
Nice flowery speak – little presents, I imagine.
Harmless trash that won’t cause anaphylaxis.
Anyway. You risk your life Piloting a ship here, and I suppose someone should say… thank you.”
I opened my mouth to blurt actually, no, you don’t understand – I am Mawukana-from-the-Dark, I was made in deepest black, I am a meagre copy of the dead, there is no…
… but te had spotted someone else te needed to shout out, to rebuke for their failings, and was already marching away.
After that, I became a regular in Adjumir’s airspace.
I shuttled in diplomats and scientists, politicians and eager aid workers who felt sure that they were going to have some brilliant idea, some dazzling insight that might, in its way, be more potent than the shock wave of a binary star supernova sweeping across the heavens.
I ferried out crabs and molluscs in cryopods (“The carrion of the sea!”), fungal scrapings from the deepest, blackest caves (“Vital for ecological consistency”), seeds upon seeds upon seeds, all carefully labelled and sealed for their eventual replanting in Adjapar’s soil, once it had soil to carry life.
I shepherded entomologists (“Insects must precede flowers and fruits! It is baffling to me how many so-called planetary engineers miss this blisteringly obvious evolutionary fact!”) and anxious historians (“It took so long for us to learn from our mistakes. Imagine the mistakes we will make again, if we forget”).
I practised Adjumiri, and whenever I returned to Xihana for the Emni to rest and shed some of his weight, the Major would visit and confer with Hadja in a corner.
“Is he safe? He is occupied… but is he safe?”
And Hadja would reply: “He appears to have a kind of purpose. I have not yet determined why.”
Then the usual line of psychologists and doctors would come to visit, and the questions they asked were almost identical to those the doctor asked on Hasha-to.
“When I sleep, I dream of flying – yes or no?”
“It is winter, and the lake has frozen over. What do you do?”
“A friend visits. They have made a delicious meal, but you know already that you do not like the taste of it. Do you eat the food, or make an excuse?”
“What is the taste of music?”
“I think that sleep is like a kind of dying – yes or no?”
I answered their questions politely and thoughtfully, as I always did, while Hadja hovered by my side. Only one of my visitors asked this:
“What do you feel, when you go to Adjumir?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you want to go.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
“No. I am told it is because I want to make a difference. That I am a ‘good man’. A lot of people want to help in some way, but very few do. I think it is because they think that ‘helping’ is somehow ‘fixing’. Somehow being a hero. But no one is a hero, against a supernova. And everyone is too. Everyone who did anything at all, no matter how small, because that’s all change is – a great big enormity made up of a vast, uncounted mass of tiny actions.
But that’s not what people want to feel.
They want to feel… special. A special kind of hero.
I don’t feel that way. What I do is irrelevant.
And also if I did not do it, things would be worse, so it matters to do it.
Matters, does not matter. Do you understand me?
It is… pleasing that people are happy to see me, when I go to Adjumir.
It makes me feel… nice. But I think the truth is that the world is going to die. I have never seen a world die before.”
The psychologist made a note, and I knew I had said the wrong thing and everyone in the room was a little bit afraid. Frightened enough that they did not try to stop me going back to Adjumir.
“You can fly more sorties than any of our people,” sighed the Major. “You are safer, more reliable, more accurate. The dark, when you enter it, seems not to perceive you. Seems utterly oblivious to your presence. As if you were already part of it. Which I suppose in a way you are.”
Then I said I felt more comfortable on my island than in the black, and she knew I was lying but chose not to remark on it, since that would only make everyone more unhappy than they already were.