Chapter 12 #3
I told ter about some of the worlds I’d visited.
About Va, where they believed the written word to be so sacred that it could only be inscribed on gold, silver or pearl. (The digital word, however – they shrewdly decided not to concern themselves too much with the holiness or otherwise of that, and thus civilisation did not entirely collapse.)
About Kzichido, where peace had reigned for centuries, and how disappointing this was to everyone involved, who had been raised to believe in war as honour, honour as life, and who thus had to resort to endless convoluted sporting activities and ritualised battles to give themselves something to do in these long, wretched years of contemplative calm.
About Okopuatji, where I had experienced the worst space-lag of my life, the average day lasting thirty-five hours, which extraordinary length everyone seemed to take for granted, reaching the end of their eleven-and-a-half-hour work day with a merry cry of “And now we shall party!” and goodness how they did.
“Party? For how long?”
“Eleven hours!”
“Eleven hours? Of just… just partying?”
“Music, alcohol, dance…”
“Every day?”
“It felt that way.”
“Sounds exhausting!”
“It is! They say the long sleep cycle makes up for it, but I think they’re lying to themselves, because the things they do, the madness at the end of the day, they call it disinhibition but I don’t think it can be…”
I did not tell ter about the Shine, and te did not know to ask.
And in this way, the day drifted towards evening, and I was laughing, and so was te, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed in this way, until Hadja, who had been almost entirely silent up to this point, to the degree that I had begun to forget qis presence, declared, loud enough to make my ears shudder:
“WE WILL RETURN TO THE EMNI NOW!”
The sun was not yet set, but its descent towards the horizon was throwing long shadows across the town, stretching out the length of the song spire like a moving dial and catching crimson shadows in the playing burble of the water.
For a moment I considered arguing; then I did not, and with a creak of exoskeleton and an ache of muscles, I rose.
“Gebre,” I said, touching my fingers to my shoulder in the gesture of thanks and gratitude, “thank you for a wonderful day.”
Ter lips thinned; there was a disapproval there, though whether of my bumbling manners or the passage of time, I couldn’t entirely tell. Te looked from me to Hadja and back again, then stood at once, the scraps of meal at our feet ignored, and blurted: “Are you interested in sharing skin with me?”
“I… What?”
“Are you interested in sharing skin?” te repeated. “It is a simple question.”
“This is not a phrase I—”
Hadja hissed behind me, and – in a rare act of rudeness that just this once I was grateful for – translated ter meaning into neither Normspeak nor Xiha but Mdo-sa, the first language of my birth.
“It is a sexual advance,” qe explained, “which we covered in your Adjumiri language course section 7.2; clearly you were not paying attention.”
“Oh.”
“The polite form of the decline is ‘My voice must rest, though I shall often speak of you.’”
“I see.”
“Do you require further help with the translation?”
“I’m wondering… what is the polite way in which people say yes?”
We rode back to the Emni in almost total silence.
Me, Hadja, and next to the quan – who seemed to have interspersed qimself like a chaperone – Gebre.
Outside the window, the sun was setting, orange to crimson, crimson to purple, the stars beginning to emerge from the dusk. I looked for Lhonoja, but on the winding road I could not orientate myself, and it felt unclean to seek it out.
In soft Mdo-sa, a language for my ears alone, Hadja said: “On a scale of one to ten in terms of its emotional investment, sharing skin is a two. It invites physicality without emotional engagement; a common practice on Adjumir. Sharing song is a more formal invite towards committed emotional engagement following sexual intercourse; sharing light is what you would consider a marriage declaration.”
“I see.”
“Because of the casual nature of the overture, you do not have to observe any rituals, such as the cleansing of each other’s bodily cavities with appropriately scented items. You are, however, expected to treat the matter as entirely insignificant unless by mutual consent, which may be gained through further intercourse and discussion begun through the phrase ‘Will you speak to me of the springtime forest?’”
“Adjumir really loves its protocol, doesn’t it?”
“Protocol,” replied Hadja primly, “is how these people survive.”
And then, a little while later, as we slowed down for our journey through the camp, Hadja addressed Gebre.
Qe spoke Adjumiri – not the Assembly Adjumiri I knew, but ter local dialect, full of sounds that I struggled to tune my ear to. It was soft, gentle even, a tone of warning, a suggestion, perhaps, of choices not yet locked in stone, decisions that could be undone.
“He is an alien,” I heard qe say, and qe did not use the polite “off-worlder” when qe spoke. Qe very deliberately, very carefully chose the word that was steeped in darkness, a nameless, dangerous thing. “He is human/not human. An anomaly of the dark. Do not turn out the light.”
Gebre listened; Gebre appeared to understand.
“Thank you,” te said at last, “for your clarity.”
I felt my heart beating in my throat as we got off the glider before the waiting mouth of the Emni.
“This is me,” I mumbled, lips dumb and stupid as they tried to shape the words.
“I know,” te replied.
“Well. There’s no… I mean. We could. If what Hadja said… If you have changed your mind—”
“Pilot,” te blurted, cutting me off – the single rudest thing any Adjumiri could possibly do, though I did not think te meant it rudely.
“I was born knowing precisely how long I had to live if my number was not called. The day of my death, pending an accident, was set at the exact moment of my birth, and I have always known it. I have had many lovers, but I have always been diligent never to love. Love, you see, is for the living. I… will not have it. It is a price that is higher than any I am willing to pay. In its absence, I enjoy intimacy. I enjoy physical tenderness, pleasure, even courtship to a degree. I have found your company enjoyable; I believe I would enjoy intimacy with you. Is that acceptable? Do you understand?”
“Yes. I think I do.”
“Good.” Te held out ter hand. “Shall we?”
Later, I said:
“I cannot remember the name of my parents.
A few archivists helped me find what records remain, but when I tell my story, they are always just ‘my parents’.
My leg sometimes hurts – whatever forces transcribed me clearly struggled to work out what to do with my tibia.
On the one hand, my other leg offered a template, as did my genetic code.
Then again, DNA itself is never just as simple as a command that must be executed; it is a cascading dance of on-and-off, as subject to environmental stimuli as wind or rain.
“When the quarantine teams found me on the Myrmida, they pointed guns, screamed at me, seemed to understand already that I was a monster. A murderer, at least. All those dead bodies scattered around the ship – and not just dead; there had been… things done to them. Dreadful things. And there I was, absolutely fine, so of course I was to blame, and perhaps I am. Perhaps… there are certain errors in how I… perceive some things. Anyway, they put me in a prison for a while, but a Xi prison after the fires of Hasha-to was wonderful. Good food, a comfy bed, all the reading you could ask for – incredible! – a psychologist to talk to twice a week. I’d never had anyone listen so intently before.
At first I said nothing because I knew it was a trap, and then after a while I said everything, just couldn’t stop talking, and the authorities couldn’t actually prove I was a killer but they knew there was something not right, so then they sent me to a lab.
At first, I quite enjoyed being there. There was a thing in me, a thing I think had always been there, but was now…
“?… I was curious.
“So curious.
“And if people answered my questions, explained to me what they were doing when they took my blood, my skin, scanned my brain, asked what I thought, what I felt… I didn’t mind being there at all.
They let me read their papers, study their tools, learn about the drugs they pumped into me.
But one day I think I said something, something that made them uncomfortable, or I did something or…
“?… I am always doing something a little bit wrong, you see.
“Not quite wrong enough that I know what it is, or that people bother to tell me.
“Just… a thing I was supposed to understand, and didn’t, and so you see, I am… just wrong.
“I tend not to have very strong feelings, but if everyone around me is feeling something, I mean, of course I pick up on it, and by then everyone was starting to feel very, very frightened, and well, one day they decided not to answer my questions any more, and it was like something in me… became dysregulated. Let’s call it that.
Dysregulation. Hadja is very concerned that I stay grounded, centred.
Not too curious, not too sad, not too happy, not too… dysregulated.
“Sometimes, when the lights went out, parts of me… It’s as if my body also sometimes forgets what it is meant to be, along with my mind.
So the scientists in the lab, they were scared, and scared people don’t treat each other like they’re people.
They didn’t joke with me any more, didn’t tell me about their worries, their plans for an evening meal.
Gave me papers I’d already read, to shut me up, keep me occupied, whispered to each other behind their hands.
“The first time I escaped, all the lights were out and I remember just looking at the walls and thinking, goodness, that doesn’t look very real, does it?
All those atoms, and mostly just space between them, and it didn’t occur to me that things that people took for granted – gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces – were important, somehow.
So I walked out. They shot me when they found me, a few kils away from the lab.
Lethal force, but that wasn’t what actually stopped me.
It was the light. It was the rising sun.
It drove away all uncertainties, made solid things real again, and so being real, of course I was also real, which made it easier to gun me down.
“I woke up in the morgue.
“In the dark, in the black, my body forgets again.
Forgets the rules of this universe, forgets how it is meant to behave.
It defaults back to how it was when they found me in the Myrmida, as if captured in that moment.
The Xi are good people. After I woke up, some of the scientists wanted to shoot me again, just to see what happened.
I will admit, I was curious too – but by then it had all grown a little too repetitive, a little too dull, pain without result, so I ran away again, and this time knew how to avoid the light.
“I did some things, after that. The kind of things that mean there is a Major on Xihana who comes to check on me every few weeks, make sure I am stable, keeping to my isle. It’s why Hadja is floating outside the door.
Because of the things. They like to make sure I am observed.
When no one is looking, that’s when I forget what it is to be…
acceptable. Normal. Part of this world. Does this upset you? ”
Gebre contemplated this question for a while, ter shoulder pressed against mine. “No,” te concluded at last. Then, as if it were the be-all and end-all of all that there could ever be to say: “I have never been afraid of death.”
So we lay in each other’s arms, for a little while more.