Chapter 21
The Kiskol Institute of Antiquities wasn’t in Kiskol proper, but stood some fifteen tocks from the edge of the town, on top of a storm-blasted, rain-soaked cliff of black stone.
Once – years ago – people would come from kils around to visit and go for long walks along the seashore paths or through the grey forests that blanketed it.
Its interests ranged from ancient interplanetary ships and the crockery designed especially for them, through to skeletons of the great mega-fauna that had thrived in the first centuries of terraforming, before the pressure of a growing ecosystem and bio-engineers in their orbital habitats forced change upon some, extinction upon others.
Mostly it was a place for academics, its only concession to the outside world being a café serving a kind of heavy biscuit and pots of kol to the local walkers, sometimes tricking them into its more esoteric displays while they were looking for the toilets.
No more, of course. Now, no families came, no kinn from the towns and the cities.
The Institute’s gate stood open beneath the rising dawn of a new day, but the windows were shuttered where they faced the sea, and in a courtyard within its black stone walls there was only a vigil truck and a half-empty drone hub, its hooks hanging with burned-out machines and gutted parts.
Where once hundreds of researchers, students and makers of kol had taken up residence in the long dormitories cut into stone, now just twenty-nine, all numberless, gathered together in this place.
The oldest was ninety-six, the youngest in their late twenties, and they greeted the dawn and sang out the ending of the day together, and one of their number had done the short-course training as a Behkdaz, the emergency three-week programme that had been opened up to the population as a whole when the Lovers finally went supernova, and was authorised to issue Grace, and still didn’t feel especially comfortable with their calling.
I arrived in the mid-afternoon, parked my speeder in a yard of carefully raked stones that were starting to be overgrown with tangling weeds and wilting flowers confused by the season, and no one was there to greet me, and I didn’t know where to go.
I crawled out of my vehicle, Rencki heavy in my arms, called out: “Hello?”
Behind the walls the sea wind shuddered, and the clouds skimmed busy, weighty overhead. In the centre of the yard, a blasted white tree, its branches saggy with little silver bells and tangles of paper – no chimes here, a slightly different flavour of remembering, of saying goodbye.
“Hello?!”
A great pair of black doors are sealed on the side of the courtyard furthest from the entry gate, blocking a mouth of stone and bio-resin that curves down into the cliffs, as if the building were about to shout.
Even the architecture on Adjumir is designed to sometimes swallow the sound of the wind and make it sing.
For a moment, the old familiar feeling of having done everything wrong.
I’d come so far, and there was blood on my hands, my arms, my clothes, every part of me. The gravity pressed me down, Rencki was heavy in my arms, bruises were layered on bruises, and I was a monster after all and here—
“Stay where you are!” a voice barked, and I nearly laughed, the idea of moving so strangely absurd.
Someone had eased open a smaller hatch in the slate doors that barred the way to the interior of the Institute just enough for an eye, the barrel of a gun, a hint of a threat to poke out, wave towards me.
“Who are you?” An accent I struggled with, and I was tired, so sore and tired. “What do you want?”
I tried to mumble: here to help, a message, a message came, I…
Wondered how I looked, crimson in gore, a stranger at the end of the world.
“Gebre,” I said instead, and when nothing happened, tried again, thought perhaps I hadn’t been heard. “Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra sent for me. My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze. I have a ship. I came from… from above. Gebre sent for me.”
And then, because there didn’t really seem much more to add, and the gravity of this world really was exhausting, I lay down in the middle of the yard, Rencki across my chest, and closed my eyes and let someone else try to work all this out.
The person with the gun was called Ngurta.
Ey was a vigil, one of the last officers left on watch on the whole planet.
Ey had shaved eir head and drawn thick black lines across eir eyes and lips and a painted line down eir chin.
I knew this would have some meaning, communicate something – something about death, perhaps; this was Adjumir – but I didn’t know what.
The planet was too big for me to have learned all its traditions, too full of changing people facing the end.
Eir gun was a simple stun pistol, designed for keeping order in a provincial town, not fighting off numberless as they tried to storm the elevators, claw their way onto the last departing ships.
Ey had come here because eir partner was here, and neither of them had had their numbers called, and they were both desperately sad for each other, consumed with loss and pain to know that the one they loved was going to die; and also quietly relieved that they were not going to die alone.
Ngurta stood over me, weapon drawn, and sent someone else to find Gebre.
“Whose blood is it?” ey demanded.
“Mine,” I replied. “And other people’s too.”
“What happened to you?”
“Numberless.”
“Are they following you?”
“No. They are dead. It’s just me and Rencki.”
“The quan?”
“Yes.”
“Is qe dead?”
“Death… is an interruption.”
Then a new shadow fell over me, and as I squeezed my eyes open, I did not recognise the shape, did recognise the voice, deep and familiar, and it was Gebre, and te said:
“Maw? What in the name of the blackened abyss are you doing here?”