Chapter 6 #3
Excluded from the conversation and with dwindling interest in its resolution, Iris slipped away from the room and trotted down towards his cargo bay.
Already it had begun to feel like a kind of reprieve.
It was his: his pile of bones, his duffel bag lying neatly in the corner, his partially assembled skeletons.
Those, he would get to once the crisis had been averted.
Despite only having had four hours of sleep, Iris’s body buzzed with nervous energy.
It flowed through every tendon and muscle fibre, still riled from the close call in the maintenance room.
Begrudgingly, he conceded that it was Yan’s calm that had gotten him through it, and at once, a larger realisation hit.
“Well, that’s just not fair,” Iris said out loud.
If he would have told you, you would have panicked, VIFAI said.
He needed you to stay calm, so he gave you something to do.
It was good thinking. You must agree. Sometimes, just sometimes, Iris wished VIFAI performed a little worse.
In response, his construct gave Iris a small electric jolt along the brain stem.
“He could have told me,” Iris protested, ignoring the sting of his pride, knowing full well that he had been of little use in that room. “But still—”
Say it, VIFAI nudged playfully.
Back in the maintenance room, Iris had wished for nothing more than to lose himself in the soothing numbness of dissociation.
But VIFAI was right. Yan’s presence had been a comfort, a strange, abrasive kind of comfort, like a thick wool blanket that irritated the skin, but kept you warm.
Iris could think of no one else who would have handled their predicament better.
Where to place those two seemingly contradictory feelings?
Iris chose to store them in a distant corner of his mind so he could revisit them when VIFAI wasn’t watching and wouldn’t make snide remarks at this change of heart.
“Still, I’m glad he was there to keep me calm,” Iris said.
That wasn’t so hard.
Iris rolled his eyes. A deep rumbling in his stomach drowned out his remaining thoughts.
He didn’t have a watch, but the internal cue was more than enough to let him know that nearly a whole day had passed without food.
Once the time was right, and everyone had gone to bed, he would sneak away to the orchard.
But for now, he would remain here, alone, with his skeletons and the electronic voice in his mind.
He could assemble a few more bones. He could recite the sutras over the bodies.
He could, at the very least, return these people to the One Beginning and be a little bit less of a failure.
He would not, however, under any circumstances, think about the fact that they were all trapped inside a ship, that VIFAI had no way of communicating with the outside world, and that the chances of someone from Doshua coming to get them were slim at best.
Artifacts like the Nicaea were expected to be in disarray.
Faulty doors and flickering lights were only the tip of the disrepair they all should have expected.
And even if a hostile takeover were to come from Doshua or from a research institute, it would be financially hostile.
It was highly unlikely someone would murder a Starlit monk or a handful of academics over a generation ship.
Highly unlikely. Unless … unless the takeover wouldn’t be financial, and the interests of an institute or a station outweighed the value of human life.
No, he would not, under any circumstances, add to the panic that was already dangerously close to spilling over.
Decisively, Iris pulled a smooth skull from the bone pile and held it up in his outstretched hand. A perfect, round hole in the glabella stared back at Iris. “That’s not natural,” Iris noted, and passed the skull from one hand to another, never breaking eye contact with the hollow sockets.
What? Humans don’t usually develop holes in their heads?
Iris winced. Death was familiar. It had been his close companion since childhood, and he had no strong feelings about it one way or another. Starlit preached that death was a mere illusion, not any less or more real than living itself.
Death is the shift in the tide, the crashing of a wave, never, even for a moment, apart from the whole ocean.
When he was just a boy, Mother Nova had informed him that while he quickly had intellectualised this idea, he was still many years from internalising it.
Hypothetically, the ocean of nonexistence was a comforting thought.
Even at the age of ten, Iris found the idea to be one that was soothing, but it wasn’t until much later that Iris had embraced it in every single one of his cells.
While death itself held no sacred meaning for him, the violence that often preceded death still confused Iris, angered him in a way that things should never anger a Vessel.
Gingerly, he placed the skull atop the carpet of green moss.
Hollow eyes watched him, penetrating to the very core of him.
It was the violence. It was always the violence he couldn’t stand, the last gasping breaths, the curled, paled fingers, the way people always searched for something to say as they passed.
It wasn’t death that bothered Iris, it was the dying.
How soon would his own last breath fill a silent room with parting rasps?
How soon would he too search for useless words that only amounted to more grief and confusion to those remaining? No need to worry about that last part.
As Iris continued his staring match with the skull, the cargo bay around him settled into a gentle quiet.
From afar, the dull, muffled voices of the academics, now sharing in a modest meal, echoed through to the cargo bay—a tether stretched from the solitary monk to the living.
Iris took a curved rib and placed it in its rightful place below the skull.
He ached to sever that fragile tether. Most days, it was a reminder of a world that had moved on without him, a world that he could visit from time to time, but never be at home with.
Your vitals indicate—VIFAI started, but Iris silenced it with a wave of a hand.
He was well aware of what his vitals indicated.
Yet, there was still the last bit of frantic energy racing along his tendons, granting him no reprieve.
Left unattended, it could turn to frustration, to anger, and eventually could turn to rash action.
Given the circumstances, he couldn’t afford any rash action. The energy required a different outlet.
First, Iris double- and triple-checked that the door to the cargo bay was firmly shut.
Seeing that he was safe, he untied the side of his robes and slid them from his shoulders.
Heavy silk pooled by his feet, chasing towards the ground in a pearl waterfall.
He folded the robes into a neat square, then reached up and undid the tall collar of his undershirt.
His fingers danced along the left side where the edges met in dozens of small knots.
The fabric here was as white and delicate as the main robes, and Iris honoured it just the same, folding it in a neat square, creased meticulously along each edge.
Warm, humid air brushed against his bare skin as he laced his fingers together and stretched his arms high above his head.
The wide band of his trousers sat flush against his lean core, right beneath the first protruding rib, and it stretched with him, matching Iris’s movements.
His left clavicle sat too high from when he had separated his shoulder as an overzealous youth.
Something in that shoulder creaked with every rotation. It would until its very last one.
Everything eventually rejoined the Light.
Everything, including Iris’s body, was impermanent, but that was a poor excuse for not maintaining it in proper working order.
It had been a few days since Iris had stretched or moved in any sort of disciplined way.
It would burn off some of that nervous energy too; maybe silence VIFAI, maybe, even, silence his own mind for a while.
With a deep sigh, Iris placed his palms on the ground, shoulder-width apart, did fifty push-ups, paused to catch his breath, and did another fifty.
When his triceps protested, he did ten more, then sat back on his heels.
His chest rose and fell rapidly, his breathing a little heavier than he was proud of.
He followed up with one hundred sit-ups and then one hundred squats until the burning in both his shoulder and his core could no longer be ignored.
It was satisfying to move, to push his own weight, to feel the pain from exertion.
Iris lowered himself to the floor again and tried for another one hundred push-ups.
He made a valiant effort, hitting seventy before his arms gave out, and he fell face-first onto the moss.
You’re getting weak.
“Age comes for me.” Iris rolled onto his back, panting.
He welcomed the prickling of the cool moss against his flushed skin along of back and shoulders.
Spreading his arms out, Iris dug his fingers into its soft, organic tapestry and gathered it into tight fists.
The energy was tamed, briefly, and so his low-grade anxiety was rendered manageable.
If not for the gnawing in his stomach, he could sleep.
Breathing slowed, he listened for the now-welcome hum of the others’ voices and heard nothing.
Having eaten what was left, they must have wandered off to get their own rest.