Chapter 32
Later – some time later – the Emni docked with a Xi military ship.
The Mirabei was, as with all Xi vessels, a living leviathan, which swallowed up the Emni as if we were plankton drifting through her parted jaws.
She carried a crew of seven thousand souls, including forty Pilots, of whom she had used seventeen.
No one asked Rencki how qe had lost so much of qis fur; perhaps qe had already called ahead to let them know. A Lordat asked if I needed to talk about what I was feeling. I said no.
Instead, I followed our guides to a Pilot’s chair, deep in the humming basalt belly of the ship.
Military doctors and officers stood anxious all around as Gebre’s Tryphon interface was pressed against my skull, the slim object for which so many people who would have died anyway had died a few days earlier than the end of the world.
Everyone agreed – though no one directly asked – that I should be the one to do it.
It wasn’t just that I had returned from Adjumir with the object.
Not just that I had been/had not been/may have been requested by name to be its courier.
Not just that this was my
that te wasGebre was my
someone I had known.
Instead, the doctors said, they couldn’t guarantee what would happen when an organic mind interfaced with the Tryphon.
Like a navigational arcspace interface, the Tryphon was designed to connect an organic mind with a computer system.
Unlike a navigational interface, the arccomms interface was designed to punch a hole through reality no bigger than the core of an atom, requiring none of the usual acceleration or power expenditure to do so.
Through this micro-tear between the real and the dark, narrow-bands comms could be broadcast between two linked minds, bound together by the Tryphon itself.
Thus, communications could be established, blackship to command, command to blackship, all without the expense and complexity of a tanglecomm pair. And unlike a tanglecomm connection, any mind connected to any Tryphon should, in theory, be able to reach out across the dark and touch any other.
Naturally, the entangled mind would go mad, sooner rather than later.
The tear between worlds may have only been atomic in its scale, but the dark was the dark. It would be slower, softer than the great tearing-apart of arcspace navigation. Could take weeks, maybe even months before the Tryphon killed its recipients, but they would die.
Naturally, they would die, as all things did that touched the black.
Not me.
There were forty Pilots on board the Mirabei. Their lives were valuable to the Xi.
Rencki watched the first time I interfaced.
In the aftermath of Adjumir, qe had reprioritised certain processes, and though I couldn’t tell exactly what had been lost, I could sense that the protocols running at highest priority in qis system were those of anxiety, worry, maybe even – maybe at long last – fear.
“Maw?” qe asked. “Are you regulated? Are you safe?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
Here are the voices of the minds chained to their blackship chairs.
… there is music playing red on red on red I think I smell it yes there there the spring by the sea seaweed rotting on the shore it is the sound of crimson pull the bow across the string…
… again and again and again needle in the eye whose eye is it needle in yourself if you imagine it you will feel it and when you close your eye it will still be there still be there just like me…
… there is no place where there is silence…
781, 239 calling, I am calling did you hear me I am calling!
The fish scuttled across the floor, its chitinous feet silent unless you leaned down close, then you could hear it, then it sounded like the sea. When it died its belly turned yellow then black, others came to eat it they always come
… are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Can you hear me? Oh god oh god oh god it’s coming again it’s coming I can hear it coming please don’t leave me don’t leave me please don’t!
It is not a darkness. It is endless light, inverted. Your mind is the mirror. I am coming home.
I tried to count them, tried to pick out individual voices.
Some were stronger than others – new minds, bright minds, raw in their terror.
The darkness hadn’t found them yet. I tried to hold them tight in my embrace, whisper, There is nothing here to fear.
We are curious. That is all. Merely curious.
Sometimes they seemed to hear me, grow a little quieter in their ramblings, whisper when I asked my questions.
Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
Sometimes they screamed – not the cries of terror, not the dirges of pain that sometimes split the madness, but messages blasted across the dark between blackship and command.
POSITION MAINTAINED! SYSTEMS NORMAL! MAINTAINING! MAINTAINING!
I could taste the machine behind these sounds, the mechanical input overriding the crying-out of the mind through which it passed. It tasted like fluffy green, a sickly, rotting fungal flavour on the edge of perception, a thing that did not belong, that was not welcome.
Tell me where you are, I whispered. I am listening. I am here.
A few minds fled from me, or tried to run.
There was no escape; they would live and die with their thoughts flayed open to the dark.
I did my best to soothe them, and it was meaningless.
One blurted out a coordinate, and when the soldiers pulled me out of my reverie, only twenty seconds had passed, and I was bleeding from my nose, my ears, my eyes, and had been in the dark for days.
And just once, just for a moment, I saw hím.
Hís presence was fleeting, a taste like the last flash of sunset. Hé was screaming just like everyone else, and then hé was gone.
They ran the coordinates I gave them, said it was a place a ship may have been, but there was nothing there any more.
I demanded to go back in, and after I had been checked over by the doctors, they eventually let me, and the howls of minds that were touched by the dark were iron on my throat, and did not trouble me half as much as the light in my eyes when I wakened.
The next day, Adjumir burned.
There was no footage of it. Nothing could survive to record what was happening; nothing could transmit what it saw through the force of radiation that sheared the planet’s atmosphere apart like a fist through paper.
No one knew exactly what it was like when eight hundred million people died; no voices were heard screaming; no graves were marked.
In a way, that was a kind of mercy, the galaxy collectively letting out a sigh of relief that it would not have to think too particularly on all that was burning, all that was lost. Equally, the silence left room for cognitive doubt.
Had Adjumir really died? Was the land really salted with the bodies of so many millions of people?
The mind finds it far harder to imagine a negative, an absence of a thing, than almost anything else.
This is the negative space where Adjumir had been.
This is the absence left that Gebre should have filled.
Te is filling it still, of course. The shape of ter is in my mind, even when everything else has been blown away.