Chapter 12
For the next year, I flew. And every time I returned to Adjumir, the area around each landing pad had grown.
From simple security fence and basic operational buildings, tents began to appear.
Cabins and muddy streets, overloaded composters struggling to handle the weight of sewage and crooked overhangs of solar screens spilling across the valleys and over rooftops like a fungal growth as people began to drift towards the pads.
Some of them were simply curious, day-trippers come to point and stare at the odd shape of the Emni and the other atmos-capable vehicles that didn’t need to dock at distant elevator ports.
Some were workers, come to support the growing flow of logistics through the dock gates and off the planet.
A few were protesters, carrying signs and blasting their homilies through the open links of the fence.
“Exodus lies! Exodus lies! Exodus lies!” they chanted.
Sometimes, at night, when I was in the right hemisphere, I could see Lhonoja.
I didn’t know it until it was pointed out to me, half expecting to see two stars instead of their light melded into one.
It was ten years until they would fuse and explode; another seven before the shock from the blast would strike Adjumir and the light of the star would finally go out.
Until then, the Lovers shone still, normal, peaceful, unobtrusive.
“Exodus lies, Exodus lies!” shrilled the little handful of protesters by the gate. “Aliens stealing from our world!”
“Alien” was a word I had learned in Adjumiri.
It was an almost forbidden sound – “off-worlder” or “star traveller” were the correct usages taught in the schools, if only because so many of the students learning these nuances could soon find themselves on another world where they themselves might be the “alien” – a dark, threatening thing.
An intruder, a creature of otherness, unwelcome in this space.
But as the months crept by and the end of the world drew nearer, more protesters pointed at me and my clearly gravitationally challenged form, and chanted “Alien, alien, alien!”
“We shall now move away,” Hadja declared, and it was not a matter for debate.
The last people to come to the launch pads were the numberless, those whom the lottery had not yet chosen for Exodus.
Little huddles of families and friends, waiting silently in the mouths of their tents while the medical workers tutted and fussed and worried about outbreaks of gastrointestinal disease across the growing camps.
Some were old; some were children. In those days, they were not so many.
I was told the camps around the bases of the equatorial space elevators were far bigger, almost city states with mayors and security forces to keep the numberless from rushing the lifts.
In those days, such incidents were still rare.
There was still time for their numbers to be called; for their lives to be saved.
I looked for Gebre on every trip, and did not find ter.
I wondered if ter number had come up, if even now te was queuing at the base of one of the great elevators, waiting to be carried into the sky, up to the open hull of a waiting mothership.
I wondered which world te would end up on, whether it was for the cryofacilities of Adjapar and a promise of one day – centuries from now – being reunited with ter precious artefacts, or whether they were giving ter the immunisations for travel to another world, ter lungs, heart and bones altering in flight as te headed to a place where people only knew one word for “apology”.
In the end, it turned out to be none of the above, for on my twelfth trip, there te was.
“By the fires of the abyss,” te breathed, “they’re still letting you fly?”
A jolt of disappointment – a part of me had hoped that my fantasies were true, that te was already in the stars, already saved.
A far stronger jolt of something else – something like joy – to see ter face.
“Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra,” I exclaimed. “I saw our cargo manifest contained the ritual robes of a long-vanished forest cult, and wondered if that was you.”
My Adjumiri was much better, and te told me so.
I said thank you – the “thank you” of deepest appreciation, rather than the Assembly Adjumiri “thank you” of formal acknowledgement that I had learned on my first trip, and asked if te would like to tour the ship.
Te said yes, te would find that very interesting, and though ter voice was polite and level, ter hands danced in the language of childlike excitement.
I took ter around the Emni. He was in his late-autumn phase, his energy depleted by so many runs across the galaxy.
When we returned to Xihana, I would have to leave him in the storm deserts for a few weeks, let the daytime sun bathe him, the night-time water wash him clean while the bio-engineers scrubbed his decks and changed out his nutrient tanks, ready to bloom again for another flight between the stars.
For now, however, the soft buds of his corridors were closed and the ivy tangle about my bed was shedding its final leaves.
This did not stop Gebre clapping ter hands with delight as we moved through the Emni’s decks.
“I knew the Xi made living ships, but gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous! I imagine you feel like nothing can harm you when you fly something as fabulous as this.”
“The Emni is robust,” I replied. “He is constantly healing himself; he can even regenerate his external carapace from near-arcspace acceleration. If looked after properly, he could fly for centuries.”
“I love him – oh I love him! And is it true these kinds of ships have near-perfect internal recycling? Air, water…”
“He runs at near-total efficiency, yes.”
“Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”
Our wanderings had taken us to the command deck – little more than a round hollow swollen out of the forward habitation quarters – and there, in a rare square of hard lines and cold metal, was the Pilot’s chair.
Gebre moved towards it carefully, as if it might be contaminated with the lingering traceries of something black, something slippery, before looking up with fingers raised, a dance that I was coming to understand requested permission.
I nodded, which gesture had no meaning for ter, so instead clicked my tongue once in assent. Ter face split into a giant, toothy smile – though whether at the permission or my growing skills with Adjumiri colloquial, I could not say – and te rested ter hand on the back of the chair.
“Oh,” te said. “It’s really rather squishy.”
“Squishy?”
“As in… soft, comfortable? Do you know these words?”
“Ah, yes. Squishy. I had not heard that before.”
“Well. Good, I suppose, to make the Pilot comfortable. And this…” Te indicated the waiting crown of wires hanging off the back of the chair, the far thinner tendrils of the neuro-fibral connectors withdrawn into their sheaths, the interior recently scrubbed with antibacterial gel and left to dry.
“The Pilot’s interface.”
“You put it on your head?”
“Yes.”
“And what happens then?”
“The navcomm engages the bio-mechanical processor. Machine and mind working together to guide the ship. No one has yet worked out definitively why arcspace navigation requires an organic component, though a lot of blustering happens in certain pseudo-scientific circles. The experiments are hard to perform to test hypotheses – in arcspace, instruments fail; studies tend to return nonsense results.”
“Does it hurt?”
“A bit. When you first connect.”
“And when you’re navigating? In arcspace, I mean. If it’s not too rude to ask – is it rude to ask?”
“It is hard to express.” I shrugged. “At the time, everything is crystal clear, precise. The computer provides a sense of destination; all you have to do is let the process run. It is almost peaceful, even. But after, when we return, it is as if I was dreaming. There is always a sense of loss. Of something missing, a thing I have seen but cannot name. Does that make sense?”
“As much as anything, yes.”
“I am told that my experience is… anomalous. Many Pilots report experiencing things that… that are different. No one ever tells the same story.”
“But you find it peaceful.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re still flying? On Adjumir a Pilot is allowed to fly only once; twice on a round trip if absolutely no other alternative is available.
If you are numberless, you can volunteer to Pilot and may be considered, but even then, the odds of actually being chosen are low.
But you… you keep on flying and you don’t appear to be…
” Another dance of fingers, grasping at uncomfortable notions.
“Mad?” I suggested, and then, as Adjumiri never has one word when three will suffice: “Insane? Deranged? Reckless?”
“Yes,” te mused. “Something like that.”
“It is a little more complicated than that. I am… scared to tell you.”
“Why?”
“It may change your expectations of me.”
“I don’t expect anything from you.”
“I know. I like that. It is… hard to express how grateful I am for that.”
“Hard because of language?” te barked. “Or hard because of feelings?”
“A bit of both.”
Te puffed both ter cheeks out, a sign of annoyance – though one, I had learned to understand, that wasn’t necessarily directed at me.
Clicked ter tongue in the roof of ter mouth.
Turned and turned again to look around the cabin, taking in its polished walls, warm to the touch, the faint smell of soil after rain drifting through the vents, the Pilot’s chair.
Ter eyes, as they wandered, took in Hadja too, my ever-present companion, loitering a little too close for comfort near the door.
Ter gaze stayed on Hadja a moment longer than was necessary, before returning at last to me.
“Mawukana na-Vdnaze,” te said, “we should sing.”
Hadja objected.
“Absolutely not!” qe barked. “Leaving the base is unacceptable, it is—”