Chapter 17
In the morning, the shuttle did not come.
I listened to unfamiliar birds calling out to the hot sun – too hot, too sticky, thunder rumbling in the distance, too early in the day for there to already be the threat of storms – while Rencki tried bombarding the comms.
No answer from transport authorities.
No answer from the local vigil house.
I ate ship rations and waited, legs dangling over the side of one of the stepped edges of the song spire.
After a little while, the Behkdaz came.
Her white robes were a little frayed, a little less lustrous and bright than the robes I had seen on that first guide-of-the-way, all those years ago.
She walked with the briskness of one who has made this journey a hundred times, going about her daily business, straight to the heart of the spire.
Looked up, looked around as if she could picture a whole choir assembled there, hear the voices of the absent still singing in her ears, saw me, acknowledged me with a touch of her fingers to her shoulder, kept on looking at the empty places, then sang the morning song.
Gebre had sung it to me once – one of the older songs, that had nothing to do with Exodus or the end of the world. A song of happiness to be alive, of gratitude to see the seasons turn and the light move across the world. A giving thanks for the day, expectant in all that it might bring.
I knew I was meant to join in – this was a song spire, after all – but couldn’t remember the words, or catch at the tune, and so she sang it alone, as if she sang it for everyone.
When she was done, Rencki trotted down the steps to greet her.
“Greetings, kinn of the forest,” Rencki said, a phrase I guessed was localised for the area. “We are trying to get to Kiskol on a calling from the Assembly, but the shuttle does not come. Do you know anything of this?”
The Behkdaz looked from Rencki to me, then blurted: “Off-worlders?”
“Indeed.”
“Is your ship in Kiskol?”
“No.” Shockingly rude to give a one-word answer; at the end of the world, Rencki did not appear to care, and neither did the Behkdaz.
“You should not have come here. It is not the right way of things, for the living to set foot on Adjumir.”
“It is a measure of how important our calling is,” Rencki replied, tails swishing, ears twitching as qe spoke.
I realised with a start that this was qis effort at high effect, at adjusting the motion of qis small, furry body to in some little way mimic the grand gestures and sweeping declaratives of Adjumir.
I wondered if I was meant to smile, or frown, or say something meaningful.
It seemed better to let Rencki do the talking.
“The shuttle failed a tenday ago.” The Behkdaz was fascinated now, reassessing the pair of us. “There’s no one around to do repairs, and not worth sending out a team to fix it.”
“I see. Is there an alternative means of travel?”
“You could ask around town. There are some still left alive who might help you. You could try Ho, in the blue-tiled house beside the water office. But be careful. The song spire is empty, as you see. Those who stay have fallen silent. Cut themselves off from us. They do not threaten me, so long as I keep to myself, but there are numberless – only numberless. And the ones who refuse to die. Do you understand?”
“I believe so, guide of the path,” Rencki replied.
“Well then. Well then. Well then.” And then a click of tongue, a tilting of chin towards me, a sudden shift of attention. “You. You are not Adjumiri?”
“No.”
“Do you know how you will die? If your mission fails, do you have a plan?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I will give you a flask of Grace,” she declared. “You may not be from here, but it will still kill you. These days, you should not travel without it. You should not be seen to travel without it either. If you are asked. It is the height of arrogance to think you will make it off this world alive.”
This argument struck me as compelling, so I waited politely while the Behkdaz vanished down a little passage at the very bottom of the song spire, returning a few moments later with a black iron flask and a single ceramic cup, wrapped in red cloth.
I took them in both hands, feeling like I should mumble some ritual words, awkwardly shoved them into the bottom of my bag, the weight of poison suddenly far heavier on my back than the little flask deserved.
“Good travels,” the Behkdaz said, touching two fingers to her lips in farewell. “May your song be sung and your name remembered, wheresoever you lay your head.”
The blue-tiled house next to the water office was silent.
I tapped on the door, and Rencki pinged the house’s internal systems, requesting superficial data from the still-humming server.
“No one in,” qe murmured. “No one has been home for three days. There is a message. ‘I have gone to be with my kinn. I have gone to be with them. I have gone.’ That is all. We should keep moving.”
I followed qim silently from that house, and did not look back.
In the end, a lift found us.
We had made our way to the vigil house – shuttered and silent, like everything else in Millopix, but, Rencki thought, perhaps still housing a speeder in its sealed garage.
“You want to steal a vigil vehicle?” I blurted.
“Correct,” qe replied, not bothering to twitch an ear or feign an indignant sniff in reply. “We have vital business and no one else will use them. It’s simply a question of overriding the vigil systems, something which – with a little time – I should be able to do.”
“How much time?”
“I am sure it will be momentary.”
It was not momentary.
The sun rose higher, the heat thickened the air to an insect-humming soup, the shadows near-black in contrast to the blazing light of day.
I sweated and sweltered beneath the sagging branches of a thick-leafed, thin-trunked tree, while Rencki sat on qis haunches in absolute silence, staring at the sealed vigil house as if by glare alone qe could crack it.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“It will go faster if you do not constantly demand my attention,” qe retorted in sharp Xiha, and I clicked my tongue and raised my hands, melding three entirely separate languages into one meek conciliation, while the quanmech continued bouncing code against the silent house before us.
Some time later:
“How’s it going now?”
“I am making progress!”
“System a bit tougher than expected?”
“I am a sentient quan of extraordinary capacity; it is merely an adaptive algorithm!”
“But, and I may have missed something here, it is an adaptive algorithm dedicated to a single process – keeping sentients like you from accessing the system. Whereas you, being so diverse in all things, must dedicate processing power to movement and speech and social niceties and defensive capabilities and sensory processing and—”
“You are not helping!”
“I’m just saying. You predicted an easy hack, and instead—”
A polite clicking from across the street.
Rencki’s head snapped round, tails coming to attention – qe truly must have been immersed to be caught so off-guard by another’s presence.
“Yes?” qe snapped, qis accent briefly defaulting back to Assembly Adjumiri, to the standard vocabulary and style that would have come with the basic upload, rather than the more nuanced, organic-sounding Adjumiri of the local area. “What do you want?”
The person watching us wore a sleeveless vest with a single white feather hanging from the lower hem, symbolising what I could not say.
His sandy-red hair was pushed back from a high forehead and he had a bag at his feet, bulging from every part.
Behind him was a child. I found it hard to guess their age in Adjumiri terms, but imagined they were barely five or six Normyears old, their hair braided tight to their skull, a matching, far smaller bag at their feet.
“You seem to be trying to hack the vigil house,” said the man, without judgement or rancour. “Are you looking for a vehicle?”
“We are trying to get to Kiskol,” Rencki replied, and qe had reassigned processing priorities, because qis voice was back to the local accent, flowing softer, as if you could hear the friendly smile in qis speech.
“We are following a calling for the Assembly. The vigil house was a necessity of last resort.”
“Kiskol,” mused the man. “I may be able to help with that.”
He said his name was Ranwha, and the child Zanlan.
They had come from the south – he did not seem to feel the need to say more than “south” – and were heading to Elevator 15.
“Kiskol isn’t far out of the way,” he declared. “And we’ve been stopping to pick up supplies as we go.”
“If you have a vehicle,” Rencki said, “you would be doing us an incredible service.”
From behind Ranwha’s legs, Zanlan watched with eyes narrowed, fingers clenched into tight little fists. Rencki clicked an acknowledgement, then turned qis big yellow eyes towards the child.
Then, qe sniffed.
Qe raised qis big black nose and sniffed the air, then dropped, snuffled along the ground, turned in a little circle, sniffed again, and by sniffing appeared, for the first time, to discover the existence of Zanlan.
Slowly, as if the little red fox were more afraid of them than they were of qim, qe approached, ears rotating back and forward on qis skull, until qe was a hand’s-reach from Zanlan.
Then qe produced an extraordinary wet, gloopy sound that was entirely generated from qis vocal driver rather than the chemical mesh on the end of qis nose.
Children, no matter where you go, always seem to enjoy the slightly grotesque, and despite themselves, Zanlan giggled.
Rencki appeared outraged by this, leaped back nearly a metric through the air, landing on all fours with fur raised, scampered round behind my legs to peer out at the child as if threatened by a gun, then slowly edged forward again, creeping as if qe could not be seen.