Chapter 34 #2
In a few years it’ll be irrelevant anyway.
The neutrino blast from Lhonoja, moving slower than the light-speed wall of radiation at the Edge, will reach Adjumir and crack the planet in two.
Thirty years after that, the nearest astronomers at a safe distance to observe the planet’s death without also dying themselves will turn their telescopes to witness its final demise.
All very fascinating, they’ll say, a truly unprecedented scientific event, and it’ll take a somewhat more sensitive doctoral student or amateur reader to remind them to add a note at the bottom of the many papers they will write: Here died 800,000,000 people, too small to see from the heavens.
“I’ll think about it,” I mumbled, tongue tangling in my mouth. “I’ll… I’ll think it over.”
Rencki clicked in reply, just once. It took me a moment to recognise the form, a sound of Adjumir, an acknowledgement both of my answer and that in all the ways that mattered, qe was right and our conversation was done.
In the evening: “We’ll need a ship,” I said.
“That,” Cuxil replied, “has already been arranged.”
The Emni was in his winter phase when we arrived at the launch pad.
The deepest nooks were cold and grey; he lingered in his night cycle and no flowers bloomed in the bedrooms or across the corridors.
He’d been spending time in the ocean, regrowing his sub-light shielding and replenishing the life-support tanks; now he was waking, a little sluggish, a little reticent.
I pressed my hands into the curve of his soft not-quite-wooden walls, listened to the bubbling of water in the secret recesses of his hull, walked through the empty hollows of his cargo deck where once we’d carried feathered gowns and stone bowls still carrying the marks of the long-dead craftsmen who’d made them.
Sat a while in the soft mesh of a root-tangled hammock beneath his upper viewing port, swept up a few dead leaves from the kitchen, pressed my head into the back of the Pilot’s chair and thought that perhaps this was home.
Tasted guilt, sick with it, found that wherever I turned my mind it was waiting for me, no corner untouched.
Cuxil said: “None of the Consensus has ever flown with you before, Pilot na-Vdnaze. I am told it is a remarkably peaceful experience.”
I closed my eyes, didn’t even flinch as the interface slithered its tendrils into my skull. “Doing well so far,” I breathed, as the dark opened up to greet me.
Time is meaningless in the dark.
Time is arguably meaningless in the loose conglomeration of sensory agreement that people call “reality” – no more and no less than a curving towards a point exerting mass greater than your own.
I had spent a lot of energy explaining this to my rescuers when they first found me on the Myrmida – eventually I realised I was boring them, or causing them mild cognitive distress, and that these things were unacceptable, and that to them, I was the problem.
That to many, that is all I will ever be.
I left the Pilot’s chair on our exit from the quiet of arcspace, but stayed at post to help guide the Emni through his final descent. Rencki was gone; no quan keeper interfaced with the Emni’s systems, just myself and Cuxil, watching the flow of commands from traffic control.
“We shall meet with rebels, scallywags and mercenary sorts,” Cuxil declared. “And at some point, we may even do some diplomacy too.”
Ten months later, we went to the Spindle.
Adjumir was dead, but that didn’t stop the blast.
“There are many of us who are Adjumiri,” Cuxil mused, as we set our course for the station.
“Sometimes, when I sing, I sing the songs of that planet without even knowing that is what I do, but they are already fading, I fear. Our memory is not a machine. We are organic, in the Consensus. We grow old, we forget. New Consensus join, and for a while they remember, but our minds are distributed, not fused, and unless we have deliberately set out to learn the tunes… well, yes, they fade. We try to sing those we can into the machines, so that they can remember for us, but it is not the same. Not the same at all.”
In that moment, more than any other, I thought I understood a little more about the Consensus.
Cuxil had never struck me as anything more or less than a woman of Godt – true, a hugely well-informed woman, erudite and learned to a remarkable degree, with a depth of empathy and a gift for language that seemed to surprise herself as well as others, perpetually shocked by the things that rose from her understanding.
But in that moment, she spoke as if she too were Adjumiri, the tendrils of another person’s grief, another planet’s song glistening in the corner of her eyes.
Then she shook her head; then the feelings were gone, pushed away behind her present experience, this moment.
“We associate the Spindle with pleasing things,” she declared as the Emni began his deceleration towards the station.
“The people of the orbital have this concept – ‘noko’. It is something between honour and obligation – if you are their guest, it is their honour to welcome you, their obligation to see that you are served. Nothing matters more, and even if you are the most appalling of guests, the most outrageous of visitors, they must serve – not for your sake, but for their own. They are trying to get this word entered into the Normspeak dictionary – since there are so many languages spoken on the Spindle, Normspeak is of necessity the middle ground – but the lexicographers are of the opinion that, especially where Normspeak is concerned, it is not a linguistic quorum until at least fifteen billion share the word. Merely a regionalised quirk.”
Cuxil sighed, shook her head, a disappointed traveller wondering quite why the makers of language must be so rigid in their traditionalist ways.
“We think there was a place in the Southern Mare, served these fantastic cold soups, with antigen localisations for fifteen different planets. You’d think something so universal would taste bland, but we remember it fondly – very fondly.”
“Do you think you can find it?” I asked, as the fat bulk of a transport grumbled overhead, en route to a cargo dock. “By memory, I mean?”
“Perhaps. The part of us that loved it was not very good at directions, but I’m sure if we see it we’ll know it again.”
“We’ll have to look.”
She hummed in reply – Cuxil often hummed when her mind was elsewhere, and that was more often than not. I leaned back in my chair, half closed my eyes and listened to the gentle creaking of the Emni as we headed in to land.