I do not get enough visitors to really justify the labour I put into keeping the lawn in this state, but after a while I found the challenge almost as important as the result, so keep on labouring.
Around my cottage I grow vegetables and the more tender fruitsthat would not survive a winter’s blast. My most successful crop is a form of saltscar-rui, which I’ve been permitted to enter into the local farmers’ competition and once won second prize for flavour and consistency. Bursting with pride, I did not admit that I wasn’t a fan of the extremely bitter taste.
When I arrived, nearly thirty years before Lhonoja went supernova, the freshwater well behind the cottage was just that – a hole in the ground with an electric pump sitting square and ugly by its side. I consulted with a hydrologist and eventually managed to turn the whole area around the mouth of the well into a trickling water garden where lush moss bloomed. The solar roof provided more than enough electricity to run everything I desired, though after one particularly bad storm I’d gone two days by candlelight when it turned out that the backup battery had been corroded by salt and I didn’t have the parts to coax it back to life. My companion back then had been a quan called Bi, who took very badly to the blackout, growing steadily more tetchy as qis internal power declined.
“Pain is an alarm – an evolutionarily useful alarm. It warns us when we are in danger. I have experienced low-power shutdown before and know the dangers it entails. My system warns me that I may shut down, and so I experience pain!” qe barked.
“How much charge do you have left?”
“Forty-eight per cent.”
“That seems like quite a lot, given your average consumption.”
“I have set my threshold for alarm very high! You do not understand my predictions!”
Bi had only stayed with me for ten months, and I had not been disappointed when qe declared that qe had gathered all the data qe required and would be departing in the morning. Rencki assured me that qe only started experiencing alarm signals at 20 per cent battery, and that qe would inform me before shutting down the parts of qis processor that handled interactions involving such things as courtesy, empathy and goodwill.
“Although,” qe mused, “if Bi’s armaments consumed significant power on discharge, I can see why qe set qis alarm threshold so high.”
I did not ask Rencki how much qis armaments consumed, when fired. I knew that each of qis three furry tails concealed weapon pylons, and at least one was lethal. Asking seemed impertinent, and might have given the wrong impression regarding my intentions.
This then is how I lived, surrounded by the seasons and the changing life of the island.
When I had first come to this place, I had been firmly but politely told that if I wished to leave it, I must inform local authorities. A boat would be sent; escort provided. The whole thing was very formal, very bureaucratic – the Xi do love their bureaucracy – and though the Xi sometimes called upon my very specialist services, generally speaking it was suggested that everyone would have a far easier time if I stayed put. A series of officers of middling rank had been instructed to keep an eye on me, of whom the latest, Major Phrawon, was a relief from her stand-offish predecessors. She visited my island at least once a month, usually brought pie, sometimes a junior officer or a visiting researcher, who would avoid all eye contact and mumble awkwardly,my paper – fascinating project – don’t want to inconvenience, before finally the Major would blurt: “Just ask him if he’ll give you some blood!”
I always said yes, though I suspected by now that there was more of my blood in various vaults and archives than actually in my body.
“Oh!” one especially oblivious captain had exclaimed as I sliced pie into perfect sixths, served on a green stoneware plate. “I hadn’t expected it to eat!”
“We do not call Maw ‘it’,” Phrawon breathed in the soft voice of the ocean as it pulls back before the tsunami. “It is unacceptable to address a person that way; perhaps even unwise. You will apologise.”
The officer apologised, I do not know whether through courtesy or terror.
I didn’t have many visitors. Old Yulin was an exception, bumbling onto my shore after their boat was caught in an unexpected squall.
“They told me a Pilot lived here!” they exclaimed as I helped drag their ship up the shingle, rain tapping furious on our coats, feet sloshing in choppy, biting swell. “Said you were quite, quite mad!”
“I am a Pilot,” I admitted. “But I think ‘mad’ is an oversimplification of the problem.”
Yulin held a few firm beliefs. If one person helped another; if they shared their words, their warmth, their food, listened attentively and spoke no evil, then Yulin didn’t give a damn what the military had to say. “If you were really a monster of the unending dark, I’m sure someone would have killed you before now,” they exclaimed.
“That’s part of the problem,” I replied. “I’m not that easy to kill.”
When, after twelve years of friendship, Yulin’s lungs finally packed up, I found the reality of it…
… hazy.
A hazy kind of truth, a coming-in-and-going-out of possibilities, of could-not-be, of shadow and dark. The human brain is very poor at understanding absence; nothingness is far more infinite in its possibility than solid, short-lived life. My quan companion at the time reported my confusion to the Major, who imposed an actual quarantine around the island, enforced with gunboats, until such time as I had had a chance to process the death of my friend, understand that it was real.
“Maw?” she asked, down the commnet. “Are you stable? Are you safe?”
Grief seemed to me like a thing I should be able to acknowledge, and in acknowledging, be done with it. Strange, how it lingered.
“I am safe,” I said. “I am… I walk in brightly lit places.”
I was eventually allowed to go to Yulin’s sky-casting, say a few words, and they had clearly briefed their family on how to behave before they died, because several touched me on the lips in familial greeting and looked me in the eye when we spoke and seemed to be unafraid. I was so grateful then to my dead friend that I nearly dissolved once again, and had to flee back to the boat, to the safety of isolation, before the feeling broke me.
I had not made many new friends since.
