Chapter 12 #2
“We’ll be back before sunset,” Gebre assured the bobbing quan. “And you can of course come with us and keep watch.”
“Mawukana should not leave the safety of the launch site! It is against protocol, it is—”
“Hadja,” I snapped, a sharpness to my tone that surprised even me, set my heart beating fast. “There is a balance to be struck. Between safety and… and risk. Always a balance. Yes?”
Hadja processed this statement in, I have no doubt, a microsecond, but lingered a while longer to let the full extent of qis disapproval settle in. Then: “Very well. But I will not move from your side, and if we are not back by sunset, I will incapacitate you until further assistance can be found.”
“Fair enough.”
“Is it?” Gebre blurted, and I smiled and clicked my tongue, and on we went.
The people of Adjumir love to sing.
They sang long before Exodus came, but at the arrival of the Slow and qis declaration of the end of the world, they really stepped up their musical efforts.
This was, Gebre assured me, largely an instrument of social control.
Cohesion – cohesion and togetherness. That was what Exodus required.
The old song festivals of a few thousand people getting together every four years now swelled into endless churning rituals of celebration, yearning and praise.
From the solo night-callers, wandering place to place to sing the ballads of the blackened moon, to the great gatherings beneath the song spires where forty thousand people would raise their voices as one, the message was clear.
We are one, we are the people of Adjumir, the people of the forest. Some may live and some may die – some may make it to the stars and some may perish in the fires of Lhonoja, but our songs will live on.
“In Exodus,” Gebre explained, “we are taught only how to sing songs for each other, to celebrate each other, never just ourselves.”
We were sitting in the back of a flatbed speeder, pressed between empty barrels of food and drink supplied to the landing crews from far-off fields, the soft hum of the truck’s suspensor field rising a little as we whisked away from the launch pad.
As we rose up the walls of the valley, the trees about us grew straighter, stiffer, spined with thorns.
I wheezed a little as my lungs struggled in the changing air, neck aching from the press of gravity.
Hadja bobbed at my back, stoutly refusing to offer any aid, but Gebre put one finger on my forehead, a gesture whose meaning I did not comprehend, asked if I wanted to go back.
“No. I would like to see something of this world, even if it’s only for a day.”
Te seemed to approve of this statement, and why would te not? Ter life was given over to the memory of Adjumir, as if the world were already dead.
The nearest settlement was called Lud.
The houses were stacked boxes, rising away from each other to form terraces punctuated by green.
Every roof held a garden, some overflowing with hanging tendrils draping down around windows and doors; others decked out with comfy chairs and budding fruit trees beneath which the slumbering residents might wait for the end of the world.
Long avenues bisected the town, pierced by tight, tangled alleys through which the rising heat of the day could not penetrate.
On these avenues were buildings that Gebre called shops, though Hadja insisted this was a barely adequate translation, the least-bad that the linguists could do.
“They are a calling,” Gebre explained, when I struggled to understand more.
“The dice house, the bath house, the house of learning, the poet’s house, the cloth house, the grocer and the physician.
They are called to their vocations. We are Adjumiri; we serve each other. ”
“Do you… pay?” I stumbled, realising as I did that I was unclear on the correct verb in this language.
“Pay? As in… do we perform our services for the whole?” te asked. “Of course we do. I serve the Institute. My service is given to my people.”
I wondered for a moment if I should try to explain the economy of Tu-mdo, the Shine, ideas of value and worth that were clearly strangers here.
Then again, if Gebre’s number was called, te was hardly going to be shipped off to a Shine world, and perhaps this was a conversation for another, less pleasant time.
Te took me to the song spire, a tower of white basalt grown in the centre of the town.
We were too late for the dawn songs, too early for the evening, but the music never ceased in these crystal halls, whether they were snatches of dirges sung for those who had departed to the stars or swellings of chorus from little gatherings practising for the harvest festival.
We sat a while and listened, and Gebre tried to teach me the first song – a children’s song – the song of the great forest from which all life had begun and to which all things would one day return.
Te hummed a line of notes, which I mangled, so te hummed a simpler line, and in the end simply gave me a three-note drone that rose and fell in time to a steady clapping, over which te called out the beats of the verse.
Hadja watched, and did not join in. Whatever qis interest in being my keeper, music was clearly not on the list.
Then a figure in white robes moved through the hall, holding up a loose collection of clonking wooden chimes, and all music stopped.
Every head turned, every lip sealed, as the Behkdaz processed through the song spire, accompanied only by the soft clonk-clonk of hollow wood. I waited for her to pass, for Gebre to explain, which te did by putting a hand on my arm, whispering: “Let’s move on.”
Te took me to the towntree, towering over a little square a few wiggling alleys from the spire.
Seven people stretched arm-to-arm could not have encompassed its trunk, and the branches spilled out from its crown in a blue-grey umbrella of ancient blackened bark.
Wooden and silver chimes hung from every twig, singing softly in the breeze, and now that Gebre had pointed them out, I saw more chimes hanging by the occasional door, outside darkened houses and shuttered places, more silver than wood, some tarnished and green, some fresh and sparkling in the afternoon sun.
“Silver for those who have gone to the stars,” te murmured as we stood beneath the softly singing branches of the tree.
“Wood for those who have taken Grace, whose song will not be heard again. The Behkdaz are the guides of the way; if you wish, they will help you hold the cup. It is not a decision taken lightly, but when the end comes… it will perhaps be taken. Better to die in Grace than burn when the planet does.”
We stood together a while more, listening to the chimes singing their silver songs, before Gebre clicked ter tongue, murmured: “Come. There is more for you to see.”
Thus, a day spent in Lud.
I drank a variety of mostly foul drinks that my stomach was in no state to digest; I rolled dice against two elders who laughed and said I did not know my good fortune.
I was taken to the old stone gate behind the cemetery, through which younglings passed when they reached maturity and chose their name, and through which the dead were carried when their time was done and only their name remained.
In a “shop” – Gebre still struggled to find the right word, a place of speciality was the best te could settle on – te explained at great length the meaning of the crowns and gowns that you must choose for the defining rituals of your life.
Here, trousers adorned with feathers that seemed black until they flashed a dazzling blue, for wearing when you were in a time of change and learning.
Here, the green headdress of one who wishes to be bound for ever to another as kinn; here, the yellow-red robe of the scholar who has completed a task of great learning.
Ideally, of course, you should go into the forest and find your own feathers, make your own garment.
But the realities of urban living were often such that these ancient practices had to be turned into more abstract rituals, and those who were in a time of change were commonly invited up into the local fields to sleep and sing beneath the stars on auspicious nights beside the jolmwood fire, as a sign of their contemplation and rebirth.
Aware of my unsettled stomach and the weight of gravity pressing down against the support of my mechanical exoskeleton, Gebre invited me to eat a simple meal of some fluffy mass te called “bread” – yet another translation I felt I had to question – on the edge of a sparkling stream of cool water, served with drinks of crushed ice and barely spiced mashed vegetables.
“It is food fit for babies,” te admitted, “but I do not think your stomach can appreciate our delicacies.”
Te told me about ter work, sorting, cataloguing, saving what te could from thousands of years of planetary history.
“When I began,” te mused, “I thought every single thing was precious, and died inside at the thought of leaving things behind. Then I realised that this was nonsense, and instead started focusing on saving only the most extraordinary, most fragile of artefacts. Now I am more circumspect. I realise that it is important to also save some kitsch – do you understand this word, ‘kitsch’? Tempting to save only those things that represent the greatest craft, the most extraordinary beauty, but of course the reality is that such things do not accurately or fully tell the story of my people. My people, you see, also love a little kitsch.”
“I live on an island by myself, and only a few people visit me. I do not have much of much, but I have a bowl with yellow flowers on it that was painted by the offspring of a friend called Yulin. It is very badly done, but I treasure it.”
“That’s it!” te blurted. “That’s it! You understand! We must be careful not to give our descendants the impression that it’s all micro-mosaicking and diamond-form glassware!”