Chapter 17 #2
This time, Zanlan laughed, their face splitting into a wide grin as the quan approached, and when qe was within touching distance, the child very slowly reached out and patted Rencki on the top of qis furry head.
I did my best not to gape, nor point out the lethality of at least one of Rencki’s tails.
Instead, I watched as my companion nuzzled qis head a little deeper into the touch of the child, allowed qimself to be gently petted by them as they slowly emerged from the shelter of their parent’s calves the damp snuffling sounds dissolving into a thing not unlike a purr.
That is how we fell in with Ranwha and Zanlan.
It was a tight fit in the back of the speeder.
The vehicle was not especially large, and every spare mil had been crammed with food, bottles of water, spare batteries, pillows, blankets and a couple of oversized stuffed toys.
Ranwha and I sat up front, while in the back Zanlan and Rencki dug themselves a little fortress of displaced bags and soft goods, Rencki cooing softly while Zanlan stroked qis ears, back, belly and decidedly dangerous furry tails.
So convincing was my quan partner that for a moment I wondered whether qe was actually receiving pleasure from the attentions the child gave qim.
Was there some algorithm in qis OS that rewarded organic attention as our minds rewarded intimacy with joy, physical contact with the sense of pleasure, trust, security?
Or had qe simply dedicated so much of qis processing power to social blending that qe understood the easiest way to the parent’s heart was to bring the child happiness?
I couldn’t tell, and it did not seem appropriate to ask.
Ranwha drove. The big highways were still functioning, and he had used autopilot most of the way north, but the smaller roads had been the first to lose electricity when the solar transmitters had started to fail, and authorities had prioritised powering launch sites and vital services over rural routes.
“Not that you’d imagine it,” he murmured as we raced along between the high hedges and heavy, twisted branches of the trees that hemmed the road to Kiskol. “These days the nights are so bright that the speeder keeps charging even after sundown.”
There was bitterness in his voice, and I did not interrogate it. Nor did I ask the obvious questions – not while Zanlan laughed and Rencki cooed in the back. The reason for his bitterness was as clear as the reason for his love, and the same.
“So what is so important that you came to Adjumir?” he asked as we crossed a bridge over a fat brown river kissed with hot summer vapour and the slow ripple of hidden, preening reptiles.
“We were sent by the Accord. I cannot say more.”
Two clicks; he disapproves of my silence, especially now, especially when all lies should be burned away in the light of the twin suns, but he will not push further. “Your accent? You do not speak Assembly Adjumiri, but neither is it…”
“I live on Xihana. My first language was Mdo-sa.”
“The Shine?”
A nod – then correction, a click of affirmation.
Ranwha’s eyes do not leave the road. “Shine sent ships a few moons back, offered to take people out. Assembly warned us off – said they were slavers, cruel, that they lied. Didn’t stop people going, mind.
Better a slave than dead. Assembly didn’t try to stop anyone, either.
People free to make their own choices, they say. ”
“The Shine are cruel.”
A click; who is he to judge cruelty, or the choices people make, times being what they are?
“I didn’t think many people born in the Shine left. Are you a… what do they call it? A Unionist? I saw a documentary – rebels, someone was martyred, they use the symbol of the binary star. The Shine pretends they don’t exist, but Lhonoja, the Edge…”
His voice trailed off. There are some things too big for even the Shine, too big to really encompass and name.
“I am not a rebel. I… There was an accident. I was changed. I am not… It is not something I am comfortable with. I want to tell you that I am not a coward, that if I thought I could make a difference… although it is… complicated.”
“You don’t seem to be a coward. You came to Adjumir just in time for the world to die. You could have stayed away. I suppose that makes you brave. Or stupid. Or both.”
I said nothing, tried to press a little deeper into my chair.
The morning’s thunder was already thickening up for afternoon rain, a grumble to the east, a smell of preparing green that drifted through even the sealed bubble of the speeder. Then: “Did you come by ship?” he asked, the simplest thing in the world. “There’s no elevator nearby, no shuttle pad.”
“Yes.”
“Was that the ship that came through the skies over Millopix during yesterday’s storm?”
I didn’t answer. Behind me, Rencki was still gently making little purring noises in Zanlan’s lap, but I could feel the force of qis attention on the back of my neck, hear qis warning voice in my mind as though qe had actually spoken.
Ranwha clicked his tongue twice at my silence, and in silence we drove on.
Later, it began to rain.
At first, it was beautiful, dark shadows broken up by dazzling light sweeping across the land.
Then it was powerful, slicing torrents tapping in across the dome of the hollow vehicle.
Eventually, it was more than that – a view-blocking, world-blocking, day-smothering wall that forced us to a halt on the side of the road, turned the land beneath us into a blackened river, broken only by distant stabs of lightning.
I wanted to step outside, to reach my hand into it, taste it, open my mouth and drink in the sky.
Knew that Rencki, now silent in Zanlan’s lap, would not approve.
Wondered what people would see if they saw us now – a tiny bubble of light caught in the middle of the day-become-night downpour.
Zanlan slept, the roar of thunder and rocking of rain a familiar thing.
Ranwha played music. It was old music, he said – music made before Exodus.
There were only two kinds of music made now, he added.
The music of those who had escaped, already changing with the inflections of alien worlds, the rhythms of strange, different cultures; and the songs of those who were left behind.
He didn’t like either, so he played the old tunes.
He used this word – “alien”. It tripped off his tongue, a familiar, habitual thing, and he didn’t seem to notice.
I looked to Rencki, who to all intents and purposes appeared to be asleep in the child’s lap, and who was not sleeping.
After a while, the storm eased to merely a torrent.
Ranwha checked his computer, tutted at what he saw, said: “Weather sats are down, but I’d guess this will keep going into the night.”
“I agree,” Rencki opined from the back seat, not bothering to open qis eyes or feign the movement of qis jaw. “It is most probable.”
“I don’t think we’ll make it to Millopix without recharging – not in this. There’s a village nearby. I have some friends there.”
“Are you sure they’re still alive?” I blurted, and immediately felt embarrassed to have been so direct; but Ranwha’s fingers danced in a kind of shrug.
“We shall see.”
He turned off the music, and onwards we drove.
I did not keep track of time in the rain.
The world outside was moving shadows and illusionary distances, lights looming in some far-off place that was neither earth nor sky, then disappearing again, swallowed by the storm.
I had not imagined weather could carry on so long, or be so deep.
The energy of the distant nova was already starting to cook the atmosphere, heat up the system from within – I had not thought I would be here, alive, to see it.
It felt like a strange kind of honour. An ugly privilege to be a witness.
I thought I could hear Gebre whispering in my ear: Only matters if you stay alive to speak of it.
Then Rencki spoke, and qe used neither Adjumir, Normspeak nor Xiha. Instead, the old language, the one that tasted like vinegar on my lips: Mdo-sa.
“We’re off-course,” qe said. “We’re a long way off-course.”
“What’s that?” blurted Ranwha, his knuckles white on the wheel, eyes fixed on the limited vision of the road ahead. “What did qe say?”
“Qe monitors my vitals,” I blurted. “My body – I’m not used to the gravity, the air. Qe said my blood pressure was high.”
I could hear the lie, awful, stumbling on my lips. Hoped that my rusty Adjumiri would hide it, my bumbling efforts mistaken for poor language skills rather than a lack of imagination.
“Do you need to pull over?”
“How far are we from your friends?”
“Not far now. A few tocks at most.”
“Be careful,” Rencki murmured, still in the language of the Shine. And then, the most dangerous of all commands: “Be curious.”
“It’s fine,” I told Ranwha. “It’s fine. I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”
He neither clicked his tongue nor spoke in reply.
The village was not a village, but a little cluster of buildings around a farm.
A huddle of speeders and trucks, ranging from tiny two-seaters up to lumbering modified beasts, were parked in the yard before the long, low central house.
A broken wind turbine sat storm-torn behind a high solar-panelled barn, and as we approached, a burst of creatures I had never seen before, antlered and low to the earth, bounded away.
The rain was easing into a merely soaking afternoon, the light muddled and muted as if humbled by the strength of the storm.
We pulled up on a patch of white gravel beside a garden of wind-blasted trellises and cracked glass, and Ranwha said: “Seems like someone’s inside,” and didn’t look at me as he spoke, and didn’t wake his child, sleeping in the back.
He got out of the vehicle, and I stayed seated a moment as Rencki, gently – so very gently – uncurled from Zanlan’s form. “This is wrong,” qe whispered in Mdo-sa. “I am pinging emergency comms. Comms are not responding. Widening the band. Transmitting distress beacon. Transmitting.”
“What do we do?” I breathed.
“I will provide security. I will… Wait. I am connecting, there is—”
A crunch of gravel cut caught my attention, cut Rencki off mid-sentence.
The door of the house was open, and in the light of it I could see Ranwha and another shape beckoning us over, their heads tucked beneath the lintel and away from the still-tapping rain.
I looked to Rencki for advice, but whether because qe had none or qis processors were occupied elsewhere, qe said nothing.
I climbed slowly out of the vehicle, and heard the gentle pawing of Rencki landing on the earth as qe followed me.
We walked towards the waiting figures in the door, and as I opened my mouth to make some sort of polite greeting – some half-snatched words of ritual and thanks – Rencki cried out: “Gun!” and qis tails sparked to electrical life, rearing up to fire.
Too late, of course. The electromagnetic shotgun was primarily a quan-killer weapon, designed to fry electronics, sizzling through Rencki’s systems with a scream of magnetic chaos.
Whereas when the scattershot hit me, it merely hurt like the first grasp of an arcship interface as it bedded itself into my skull, followed by an unfamiliar, unwelcome kind of darkness.