Chapter 35
Primal emotions, experienced by a human babe:
Pleasure, displeasure, hunger.
The child has not yet learned, from its parents, the nuances of these things.
They have not learned that “pleasure” can include joy, love, hope, delight, merriment at a silly joke, ecstasy at a lover’s caress, bright contentment in the sound of music.
Or perhaps they will learn something else from those that made them – perhaps for them it will be pleasure at hurting others, delight in seeing an enemy crushed, joy in being lauded, raised up on high for some act of petty cruelty.
How naive it is to think that the pleasure one person experiences may be the same as another’s.
How strange it is to think that these things are fixed, and not subject to change.
These expressions of who we are, of how we feel, are transmitted from one generation to the next.
Whole families may say: my kindler was angry, and now so am I.
Or: I do not grieve like my sibling did, and now my kinn say that I do not grieve at all.
I am not doing the emotion right; I am not feeling it the way they think I should.
Thus even in our feelings we find ways to embrace and reject each other, as if there were a true way to feel sorrow, a singular way to be in love.
The psychologists on Xi tell me that I do not have “high emotional granularity”.
I experience pleasure.
I experience pain.
It is hard to delve down deeper, to say that what I am actually experiencing is love, or hate, or satiation, or jealousy.
(Sometimes, I am simply hungry.)
Consequently, when I am overwhelmed by emotion, it can be hard to say what that emotion is. “Dysregulated”, the Xi call it. “Maw,” they say, backing away towards the door, “you’re being dreadfully dysregulated.”
A catch-all word for too much love/hate/pain/fear/noise/anguish/anger/horror/dread all experienced all at once.
Curiosity, too. I experience that, as potent and powerful as any of the grand sentiments in which my keepers have invested value, meaning. But the psychologists do not think it wise to dwell too much on that particular quirk of my nature.
We were met at docking by a Spindler who introduced herself as Agran, and who spoke Normspeak with a soft but recognisable Adjumiri accent.
“Welcome, Ambassador,” she said, bowing to Cuxil with two fingers touched to her lips. “Welcome to the Spindle.”
“Thank you.” Cuxil returned the bow, to the same depth and with the same finger-touch as Agran, a courtesy she made look native. “This is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, my assistant.”
“Of course. Your name is on the registry. I am your assigned contact during your time here; please permit me to accompany you to your rooms.”
I followed a few steps behind Cuxil and Agran as they made small talk, letting the sounds and smells of the Spindle wash over me.
The slight dryness to the atmosphere you always got on non-bio-formed habitats, a taste that was best understood as the absence of other things – the absence of plankton decaying on a distant sea, or wet soil releasing after rain, the thick slurry of scents that made up richer, organic systems. Main passages were generous and wide, made a little more dangerous by the constant zipping of little cargo bikes that ding-a-linged their bells as they approached, utterly oblivious to the markings on the floor asking them to keep to the right.
In the absence of exterior windows, murals were painted on almost every available surface, paint cutting in to every warning marker and safety notice, colours glistening and fresh.
Images of faces with flowers for mouths, galaxies for eyes.
Fantastic beasts, animals both mythic and strange, leaping creatures with antlers on their heads and arcspace engines at their backs.
Paint layered on paint, nothing permanent, nothing lasting.
Cuxil and Agran talked of trivial things as we walked – how was the ambient temperature in the plaza today, what about the humidity?
Cuxil had heard there was a fujiva delegation arriving for the conference – were they already here?
Yes, oh how wonderful. No, she had never met a member of that elusive far-off species, though members of the Consensus had and their experiences drifted like half-forgotten memory on the edge of her awareness, unintrusive unless she strained to reach for it.
Unusual for the fujiva to attend a human gathering – the high-pressure, high-acid conditions of fujiva worlds make visiting so unpleasant for humans and vice versa.
And how is the gravity today – ah, a little high, a compromise between comfort and adaptability, everyone sharing the same low-level headache equally, rather than a few experiencing an absolute shocker for the comfort of another.
As a Consensus ambassador, Cuxil had no qualms about sharing the same headache equally.
And yourself, Agran, are you born to the Spindle? No? Where do you come from?
“I was born on Hadda, in the Adjumir system,” she replied, voice modulated to softness, the perpetual tones of affable good manners that stood in contrast to the high effect, dancing hands of the Adjumiris. “But I was evacuated when I was still quite young.”
“How young?” I blurted, and at once saw the thinning of Cuxil’s lips, the slight frown of a diplomat who has chosen – knowingly, if with some regret – a companion whose curiosity is not always tempered by good manners.
Cuxil has had ten months to come to terms with my nature; unlike many others, she does not appear to be afraid.
“Had you passed through the gate? Did you choose your name?”
Agran turned to look at me, blinking in surprise, trying to process the words I spoke – words that were of the song of Adjumir, rendered in crude Normspeak – before blurting: “No. I did not,” and, smiling without happiness, turned away.
I had been rude.
I was not sure what precisely I was meant to do to make it right, wondered what Gebre would say, immediately refused to wonder and so walked on in silence while Cuxil covered for my ineptitude with more chit-chat, which seemed somehow to ease the way.
Away from the landing areas, the central avenues of the Spindle were skies of solar glass, framed with painted rising walls of atmospherically isolated apartment blocks.
Semi-forested groves bloomed in the long plazas, creepers hanging down from trellised bowers over tables and benches clustered in little drink-serving squares along the long line of the central core.
Walking from one end of the Spindle to the other took over a Normhour, shortened significantly by the abundance of bikes propped freely against every wall, each one swathed in artificial flowers or glittering lights or pumping out music even when they sat at rest. A faint smell of algae drifted on the air in the central concourses, which Cuxil swore she could not detect and Agran seemed baffled to hear mentioned, reporting that the only time she smelled anything out of the ordinary on the Spindle was when she entered areas conditioned for off-worlder residence and relaxation.
In the heart of the orbital, set in a central plaza framed with running water in which silver fish danced beneath gentle trickling fountains, was a black cube, cool to the touch, impenetrable to even the most sophisticated of scans: the emissary of the Slow.
Some people left offerings at the base of the cube, whispered their prayers.
Others had been bold enough to paint on it, great swirls of crimson and green. Even the Spindle authorities, usually so friendly towards visual forms of self-expression, had ordered it cleaned.
And so the Slow remained.
During the night phase, which occurred twice in a Normday, the lights across the Spindle were dimmed in residential areas, revealing a sky of dazzling starlight, punctuated by the orange-and-grey rising and falling of Mama Ryukch, the great gas giant around which the Spindle turned.
Every second day, the orbit of the Spindle drifted over a centuries-long storm, a spinning black eye of thunder.
I found it hypnotic; moving too vast and slow to fathom, yet blink and it has changed, is transformed, though you cannot quite say how.
During the day phase, the sun rose above the great concourses and the long water gardens, and the temperature rose too, the constant changing of seasons throughout the day a celestial answer to the bickering about what “comfortable” internal conditions meant for the diverse inhabitants.
The travel guides had been clear – pack layers to see you through the cycles of the day, and be prepared to show every immunisation certificate in both hard and digital form at docking.
Rising up from the plazas towards the apartment blocks themselves, pressure-sealed doors and signs alerted you to the more apparent dangers of space.
Gravitational readouts indicating areas of higher or lower weight, matched with CO2 levels and atmospheric composition warnings, invited all people who might experience discomfort in the environment they were about to enter to consider calling up the local doormaster and asking for a survival suit before transition.
“I often wonder,” Agran murmured as she led us through pressure doors to the slightly lower gravity of Cuxil’s apartment, “if all planets smell, and the inhabitants just don’t notice it.”
“Oh yes!” trilled Cuxil happily. “Even laying aside regional geographic variations – of which there are plenty – everyone is so used to the smell of their ‘normal’ air that they don’t realise it does smell!
Even if your brain doesn’t have a concept of the smell of oxygen, minute differences in ozone, nitrous and sulphuric compounds can do a number on your sense of ‘normality’.
It’s absolutely fascinating – if you get a chance, there’s a wonderful exhibition on tour that allows you to sniff a number of aromas from various planets, without any likely ill-effects. ”
Cuxil found most things fascinating. It was one of the things we had in common, and perhaps, in her own way, one of the reasons she had decided not to fear me, despite everything she had been told.
Agran, I thought, feared me.
As soon as Cuxil was through the doors to her room, Agran’s shoulders pulled back, her chin tucked in, her hands locked tight by her sides. I wondered what she’d heard, whether she thought her Spindler manners would crack all the way into the bluntness of an Adjumiri.
If, that was, you could say that Agran was Adjumiri at all.
Was/was not.
She had not walked through the gate, she had not chosen her name.
She used the name that had been given to her by her kindlers, perhaps her gender too.
Did she know what it was to step from beneath the pillars raised by her ancestors and declare that she was “one whose heart is laughing beneath the endless sky” or perhaps “one who walks on sun-kissed stone”?
Did she understand that she was not fixed as this person, this Agran, but that the children of Adjumir were always seeking, always reaching out to find something new in the world around them, inside themselves?
Perhaps not.
Perhaps yes.
Perhaps she knew all of this, and had decided that here, where things were fixed – the same orbital day, the same path from top of Spindle to bottom – there was no room to be anything other than a statue of impermeable stone, drawing no attention in this other place.
Gebre had always said ter people would change.
I could only respect whatever decision she had made, and so silently followed her through the Spindle’s star-soaked, sun-bathed halls.
Later, the Executor arrived.