Chapter 39 #2
Hulder does not drink, since it would be an electronically destructive act, but rather plays with a thick-stemmed flower plucked from the long gardens of the Spindle.
Qe does this because qe understands that humans like to cling to their glasses of water or fruity wine when they speak, for security, for comfort, discharging their emotions into little movements and gentle sips like a quan might discharge static.
If fellow conversationalists are not holding a glass, then the humans are immediately more uncomfortable – other, other, other!
rings the bell – and so, because it is easier to enable the limited powers of human empathy to latch onto something, anything at all, than it is to explain their own quirks back to them, Hulder plays with a flower and says: “Really? Please, do tell me more…”
A voice rings out: “But you know what’s happening, you know…!”
It is loud, the precise Normspeak accent dissolving into something else, a localisation I cannot put my finger on.
A few people – those less trained in the art of pretending that everything is fine – turn.
I am one of them. I do not know the ambassador who has cried out, who is being hastily hushed, taken to one side.
His face is red, his knuckles white, his skull is shaved and a network of tattoos in the blackest ink cover the soft, sandy skin – I think this is a thing common in a region of Nitashi, a planet where not even the most stringent of vaccines could keep me from rampaging hay fever the one time I visited.
Then the crowd flows back over him, and the polite chatter of understandings being made, rumours spread, returns to the hall.
I eye up Hulder again, make my approach. Slip into qis presence with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. People shuffle politely to make room for me but no one acknowledges my presence until finally Hulder does, qis voice modulated bright, speaking precise Normspeak: “It’s Mawukana, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“A delight – such a pleasure to see you again. Mawukana na-Vdnaze, may I introduce you to the ambassador for Umm-ai’lana and her assistant…”
And then they keep on chit-chatting, without a care in the world.
I scrambled through the patterns of speech Cuxil had tried to teach me: questions about weather (unhelpful on the Spindle), a compliment about some manner of dress, a remark about the food or some ambient quality of the room – the music, perhaps, or an object of art if one could be seen.
None seemed appropriate and so: “Ambassador,” I cut in, and it was rude, and everyone recoiled, just a little bit, to let me know it. “May I speak with you in private?”
“Of course. After second night? I am really rather busy now…”
“After second night is fine for me.”
“Then I shall see you by the Slow. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
And off qe went again, another dignitary spotted, another cry of “Ah, how lovely!” and an effortless transition to the language of the one qe greeted, the performance of some greeting ritual, the touch of a cool synthetic finger to just the right place on someone’s warm organic back.
Perhaps qe doesn’t remember me. Perhaps I have been wiped from qis memory banks.
Perhaps qe remembers me perfectly, and that is why qe does not care.
I watch qim go with a mixture of jealousy and rage, my awkwardness and unease hot in my face, suddenly heavy in my borrowed clothes.
“Shall we speak of things under a certain star?” said a voice to my left.
Agran spoke Adjumiri with an unfamiliar accent – the sound of the Spindle, perhaps, the sound of someone whose first language is now becoming their second. I answered in Assembly Adjumiri, vowels tinged with something of the Black Mountains. “I am always open to honest conversation.”
Agran smiled, nodded – Gebre would never have nodded – slipped in to stand by my side, gazing round the room.
She had swapped her workaday garb for what I took to be the more formal dress of a Spindler – intricate swooshes of colour weaving in and out of each other in tangled layers, as if Mama Ryukch had turned from gas to cloth and been twined around her limbs.
“I must apologise if I came across as… brisk earlier,” she murmured, speaking slow, careful, forming Adjumiri as if dredging the sound from some half-lost memory.
“You asked about Adjumir. About things that… that I have not thought about for a long time. Things that are from a dead place, you see? On the Spindle, it is unacceptable to be rude. We live too close for anything but the height of good manners. Please accept my humblest apologies.”
“I was thoughtless. I spoke without thinking.”
“Yes,” she mused, “you did.” At my look of unabashed surprise, she smiled, broader, brighter than the reserved affect of the Xi – a flash of her parents, perhaps, a recollection of another way of being. “On Hadda, I am certain you would have been considered honest, not rude.”
“The Adjumiris I knew were always very direct,” I conceded.
“You spent time on the planet?”
“Yes. Some.”
“I would like to hear about that. I was going to ask what it was like, but I do not think you would expect me to summarise life on the Spindle in a few choice words, let alone the memories of a planet that has burned.”
I clicked my tongue in acknowledgement, a linguistic habit that came with speaking Adjumiri, and to my surprise, her smile widened, and she clicked in reply, then laughed at the effect. “You should meet my kindler,” she exclaimed. “Xe’d like you.”
“It would be my honour. Although I have to tell you right now, I’ve never had a stomach for kol.”
“Goodness, no – foul stuff.”
“Have you told your kindler that?”
“Xe knows. Xe disapproves. Xe tries not to, but I know… Xe is incredibly proud of me, and also, there are things I do, ways I speak xe does not understand. Perhaps never will.”
“You are doing well for yourself.”
“I suppose I am,” she sighed, turning the glass in her hands just like Hulder might have twisted that flower – but Hulder knew what qe did.
In Adjumiri, her voice was broader, a little louder, as if the language itself encouraged disinhibition.
“There isn’t really much choice, is there?
When you are not born in any place, when every day you are reminded that though you are welcome, you are different.
Just… a little bit different. You have to do well for yourself.
You have to do so very, very well, if you are to do anything at all. ”
I tilted my chin towards the place where the commotion had been – the shouting man, the hush of diplomats closing ranks. “What was that about?”
“The ambassador from Nitashi? You don’t know?”
“I live on a very small island in a corner of a planet where not many people go,” I sighed. “And though with Cuxil I do… a great many things, the galaxy is vast, no?”
She studied me for a moment, trying to read whether I was joking or not.
She was better, perhaps, at judging these things than most – Spindlers had to be.
She clicked once more, a habit borrowed from her ageing kindler when bustling about xer home, then shook her head, a mannerism of which her kindler most definitely would not have approved.
“They say the Shine are preparing to attack Nitashi. It’s outside Lhonoja’s blast zone, population of less than three hundred million.
They say that the Executorium has already voted, decided that it’s better business – better Shine, would you say?
– to conquer Nitashi than try to protect the worlds it already has.
Everyone’s seen the fleet build-up. Nitashi wants the Accord to send aid, but it’s not a full Accord member, never signed the protocols, and anyway, the blackships… ”
“The Accord won’t openly engage in war with the Shine while there are planet-killers pointed at its worlds.”
“Quite. I’m sure there’ll be a proxy war, if the invasion does happen.
Arms and resources funnelled through whatever blockade the Shine puts about the planet.
Perhaps they’ll ask you to help. They say the ghost of Hasha-to is the most accurate Pilot to ever cross the dark, capable of flinging a ship through arcspace and out the other side to within a mil of its intended destination.
Perhaps they’ll give you a nullship, ask you to turn smuggler. ”
“I had no idea people said so much.”
“This is the Spindle. Conversation is our business.”
“What else do people say, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Her eyes flickered across the other guests, wondering perhaps how many nearby might speak Adjumiri, understand our gentle murmurings.
Fewer and fewer every year, I wanted to say.
Soon this speech that should be sung between the spires will be a whispered code, muttered in gloomy places between dying friends.
“They say that your presence here, with the Consensus, is further proof that the Consensus is preparing to fight. The quans too – the mainframes may have differing operational standards, different ethics, if you will, but ever since the Slow,” a tilt of her head towards the watching black square, the silent emissary standing over us, “sent qis message all those years ago, the quans have been… restless. They say that if the Slow thinks these times are worth witnessing, worth speaking to, then perhaps there is a test, of sentience, of something – the quans disagree on what – that should not be met with passivity. The Shine has blackships pointed at the mainframes too, of course. Even the hidden ones, the ones in the asteroid belts or on the edge of a star’s coronal field – would you really take the risk?
How many billions must die to stand up to the Shine’s bullying?
How many lives is it worth? I would not want to make that call.
I would not want to see what history would say of me if I did not. ”
“You seem to think war is inevitable.”