Chapter 19
When the Xi first found me, after the Myrmida, they tried to contain me, but I was curious, and would not be contained.
Then I wandered for a while, and had no purpose.
Then I met some Unionists – fiery, furious refugees who called the name of Sarifi, Glastya Row, Lhonoja, the binary suns – and with them I returned to Hasha-to. They planned to stage a heroic rescue, and they died.
I died too, shot through the chest, my body thrown onto the surface of the world to burn, my corpse devoured by an atmosphere of acid and fire. Thankfully, they didn’t throw me far from the airlock, and once they’d dumped my body, they forgot about me, and that made all the difference.
On Adjumir, in the last days before the end of the world, a group of numberless driven by a mixture of ego, terror and love hurt me.
They did not know how to hurt me. They were not inherently violent people. If anything, they seemed a little embarrassed at what they were trying to do, and kept on muttering among each other, asking if they’d gone too far, if they should stop.
Ranwha kept them going, of course.
Ranwha was the only one there who had a child, and he loved that child so much he thought his heart might break, and so he hurt me the most, because that was what he had to do.
Thoughts, drifting in a semiconscious state.
The people of Chulla’s World have only one word for sky and space – “above”.
To them there is no difference between the thick atmosphere of their planet and the vacuum beyond; these things all lie above the surface of the ocean and are therefore all one, clumped together in a great big “above” that is spoken of with a mixture of awe and dread.
Equally, many cultures who have crossed the stars still gaze down into the oceans beneath their ships and use words of doubt, unease, otherness.
Abyss, deeps, depths; they construct horror stories of the fearful dark.
Perhaps there is a limit to what any one mind can truly fathom, a corner of our brains that is always given over to terror of the unknown.
When not hurting me, Ranwha pleads.
“My child,” he whispers. “My child. My child!”
It would be easy enough to say yes, but fundamentally meaningless. Eight hundred million people are going to die; the life of a child is everything/nothing. I am aware that in his mind, I am the villain of this story.
“I am Mawukana-from-the-Dark,” I whisper through swollen lips. “I am the ghost of Hasha-to.”
I can feel a few people in the room starting to believe me, which will only make things worse.
A hand lifts me up. I am lighter than they expect – a couple of times someone wondered if they were going to accidentally kill me, if my weak off-worlder bones were going to shatter. They broke my exoskeleton an age ago; it is such an easy thing to break.
This isn’t working, someone says.
Someone else gives me water.
I drink automatically, and it tastes… peculiar.
Something in the minerals, perhaps, something in the pipes.
I wondered where it had come from, whether there was a spring somewhere in nearby hills, a place in the land where it just bubbled to the surface, flowing into streams into rivers that were themselves fed by another squeezing of the earth, if the water cycle on this world was like the water cycle on mine, how these endless rains were changing it, if the taste I tasted was in fact water plus supernova, the taste of radiation, the taste of Lhonoja, of a dying binary star.
Someone says: He doesn’t look right.
They don’t mean “bloodied, broken, wounded”.
They mean “other”.
Something uncanny, not quite one thing; a copy with a transcription error that no one can really put their finger on, but you can look at and just know there is a wrongness.
“I am the ghost of Hasha-to,” I mumble, tongue like wool in my mouth. “I am an it, not a he.”
“Why does he keep saying that, why does he keep saying…”
In the end, the lights went out before I could die.
A storm somewhere nearby, the distant sound of constant thunder; lightning struck a pylon perhaps, or maybe the pylon was hit days ago and the farm was functioning on its own power.
My cottage on its island can run off a few hours of sunlight a week, but on Adjumir everything is falling apart.
Radiation, heat, the moon of Lhonoja blazing above – things fail.
Things fall apart. And so, a little before dawn: the lights go out.
Rules bend, in the black. Sounds too big, walls too thin.
Expectations crack, warp, crumble. The imagination starts to fill in the gaps, the protective instinct of the living brain seeing everywhere danger, danger, danger.
There is a piece of me that will always love the dark, always love coming back to this state, when reality grows thin.
I have always found it fascinating, the stories people tell themselves to bring comfort in the dark.
Stories about being special, important, unique.
“Valuable” even – but valuable to what? To other humans?
They will fade and die as surely as you will, and what then is your legacy?
The words you leave behind? Your carvings made in stone, footprints in the sand?
Sooner or later every sun will be a Lhonoja or a red giant that swallows planets whole.
Perhaps this is why so many cultures believe in a life after death. What an extraordinary gift it is to be alive, to be living in this moment – and how much more extraordinary to pass through that same experience without ever having noticed how wondrous it is.
Other tricks of the human brain: the ability to see the colour magenta. No such colour exists in nature, but the mind takes red and blue – the opposite ends of the visible spectrum – and fuses them into something unreal yet, to the mind, true.
The power of prediction to overwhelm sensory experience.
If you believe hard enough that you are seeing what you think you see – that perhaps this four-legged creature is a predator set to rip out your throat, rather than a gentler beast – then you will see it, no matter what is actually there.
This hallucination is strongest in the dark – with limited data, the brain will always try to fill in the gaps, and the fuel it burns is fear.
The idea of solidity. On an atomic level, matter is more space than it is mass. The experience of touch, of weight and interaction, is not one of mass-on-mass, but force-on-force, field-within-field, repulsing, attracting and repelling.
In the dark, in the deepest black where the travellers go, the rules do not apply.
There is a kind of honesty there, if you look for it.
I rose from my chair.
“Chair” – an object of mass and magnetism. I press against it, it presses against me, fields interacting, bending.
I am dysregulated – that is what the Major would say, what Rencki would blare: Maw, you are dysregulated! You need to focus, come back, remember what it is to be human!
She’s light years away; qe is dead.
Around me: nine organic objects and a gun.
They shine so much more brightly in my vision than they did when crude burning light illuminated them.
Some are here because they genuinely think they matter more than someone else, because they cannot fathom how their lives are not important, because in the bottom of their hearts, they actually believe that they are special, that they deserve – no, they are owed – a second chance.
The majority are here because they are afraid.
Not even the Behkdaz could convince them that the end could be peaceful, that it was simply a breathing-out, a letting-go.
Their terror is a mind-shaking thing, an earthquake in the soul.
Ranwha, of course, is here for love. He shouts at me to stay down, tries to knock me back, swinging wildly, blind.
His fist interacts with the molecules of my face.
He expected a crunch of bone-on-bone, but these things have grown somewhat vague, and he has to force his arm back, yank it free of me like pulling a magnet from an iron bar, gasping at the ice forming about his skin, and finally, at last, even he understands.
Of all the reasons why these people are here, love is the most fascinating.
There is an idea, common to many cultures, that love resides in the heart.
This strikes me as a historical hangover from the millennia before we had a proper anatomical understanding of the human body, combined with a romanticisation that does indeed lend itself to all these ideas of special, vital, worthy by means of a soul, et cetera.
But I suppose even I can sometimes be subject to the impact of these little narrative tales, which is why as shots rang out and the room shimmered into a familiar, cool place of humming energy and motion, I reached into Ranwha’s chest and pulled out his still-beating heart.
After, when there was nothing else interesting left to do on the farm, I sat on the roof of Ranwha’s speeder and watched the sunrise.