Chapter 31
A storm hides you from sensors, grounds ships, keeps pursuers off your tail.
By the time we reached the lake, the thunder was clearing, but the rain still fell.
Rencki called out to the Emni, and the Emni answered, powering up in a slow hiss as he rose from the waters.
His internal gravity had been set to Adjumiri-norm for our descent to the planet’s surface. As we began our ascent, he eased back to Xihana weight, slowly adjusting the atmospheric composition to something a little easier for my lungs. Rencki sat on qis haunches and said: “You should rest.”
I sat in the Pilot’s chair, and did not reply, and just this once, qe left me there.
From above, Adjumir was thunder and light.
Where black clouds pierced with electricity did not smother its surface, the aurora danced, magnetosphere burning beneath Lhonoja’s blaze.
The sky was full of ships – hundreds, thousands of them, from great lumbering transports to tiny evacuation barges in final flight from the surface.
Dead satellites drifted, their systems burned out by the soft bath of radiation; the remaining comms crackled with a thousand demands – vectors in, vectors out, requests to land, declarations of departure.
It occurred to me that after all of this, the Emni was still just Rencki and me.
We hadn’t picked up any passengers, hadn’t crammed a few extra refugees into our ship; just a single white box resting by my feet.
We hadn’t even managed to load up any goods from the Institute, any paintings of ancient waterfalls or books of poems written by the river-mendicants.
Nothing to take to their descendants, scattered among the stars, to say look, look here – these people lived, these people’s lives had meaning, look how they are still living now, captured in ink and pigment to tell their stories.
You should be so lucky – we should all be so lucky – to have that kind of immortality, to still be so alive.
Still alive.
Still alive.
In these stories, they are still alive.
I wondered where Zanlan was, if the numberless child ever made it off-planet. Probably not. Wondered if an adult would give them Grace. What kind of adult could.
Mercy, murder, mercy, murder.
Only a monster would kill a child.
Only a monster would let that child live.
I breathed out, and it was the air of Adjumir leaving my lungs.
Then Rencki said: “We’re at speed. Ready for arcspace.”
I clicked in reply, and at once it felt strange, unnatural, an affectation that no longer had meaning.
“Are you going to be OK?” Rencki asked, voice neutral, worn at the edges by damage to qis speaker. Then: “You did the right thing. This interface, this journey… it will make a difference. All of it. Makes a difference.”
I closed my eyes as the interface slithered over the back of my head, didn’t flinch as the tendrils of it burrowed into my skull, said nothing in reply.
The darkness, when it reached for me, was an old and loving friend.
I reached back, happy to be coming home.