And sometimes the Xi would ask me to fly.
Thus, eleven years before Lhonoja went supernova, the Major came to my door.
“I cannot give you orders,” she sighed as we sat on the porch outside my cottage drinking cornwhite tea, “because you are a Xi citizen and I have no jurisdiction over you.”
The Major’s thick, curly hair was growing out beyond its usual military cut; her formal uniform swapped for a plain blue shirt and sensible brown shoes. On the few occasions she smiled, her whole face seemed to lift, from a suddenly appearing chin to rising round cheeks to eyebrows that swelled up towards her hairline. Most of the time she did not smile, and thus her features seemed to wait in soft restfulness, contours camouflaged beneath sea-pale skin.
“But you still have orders,” I declared.
This was not a question. I have no time for the dance that people do, the darting around a subject. It seems to make most people happy, give them a run-up to a difficult topic. With Phrawon, though she still danced the dance, as clearly she felt she had to, obfuscation just added to her exasperation. It was one of the things I liked about her.
She blew steam off the top of her mug, and clearly had no intention of drinking it. “I think it is madness that the authorities ask you to Pilot. Utter madness. But I read the reports on theMistral Springwhen she went astray. They say you walked into the places on that ship where all noise had ceased, through the blackthat light could not penetrate, and you sat in the Pilot’s chair and guided it home. They say that when theSeed of Dawn’s Embraceset out for a new world and tumbled eighty thousand light years off course, you were the only Pilot who could bring it back, the only one who could interface with the chair. There were seven hundred thousand souls on that ship, too many to risk losing on a vessel that is clearly already arc-touched, so let’s use Mawukana-of-the-Isles, Mawukana-from-the-Dark. So here we are. There it is.”
The Xi, when they acknowledge a thing as true, touch thumb and middle finger together. Disaster if you get it wrong, thumb-to-index or worse, thumb-to-little-finger while in polite company. But having learned it, it was a gesture I enjoyed, a non-committal acknowledgement, a silence that left space, offered closure – whatever it was that the other person wanted.
A while, then, we sat in silence, the Major and I.
“The Xi are sending ships to Adjumir,” she said. “It is the first planet that will be hit by the blast when Lhonoja goes, barely seven light years out from the nova. We have dispatched colony ships to aid with human cargo, but we are not… nimble.”
“You want me to fly one? A colony ship, to Adjumir?”
“Sea and sky, no! Can you imagine trying to explain to the Adjumiris what manner of Pilot we are entrusting their people to? No. Support mission only. Artefacts of historical import, biological security – that kind of thing. Show willing. Lend a helping hand. A smaller vessel – it would be inefficient to swap out the Pilot every single flight, it would slow the process to a crawl, and so…”
A loose tapping of fingers, a raising of hand to the ever-expansive wind.
“You will take a quan companion, of course,” she added. “For safety.”
“Of course.”
She did not say whose safety was the concern.
That is how I first went to Adjumir.
Chapter 9
The Shine had shot down the messengers of the Slow when they came to its worlds. In the years since the Slow had come with qis warning, the crackdown on even mentioning the impending end of several worlds had been brutal. Sometimes a sign was seen – two circles, overlapping, an image like binary suns. Sometimes a name was whispered:Sarifi,Glastya Row– but at the destruction of Lhonoja, the commnet within the Shine would carry nothing more and nothing less than its usual array of programming and light entertainment.
Not so on Adjumir.
Adjumir lay only seven light years from the collapsing heart of Lhonoja, and unlike the Shine, the Assemblies of that planet had been more than interested in what the Slow had to say.
PEOPLES OF ADJUMIR! qe had proclaimed. IN ONE HUNDRED NORMYEARS, THE BINARY STAR SYSTEM KNOWN AS THE LOVERS WILL COLLAPSE IN UPON ITSELF. THE RESULTING SHOCK WAVE WILL TRAVEL OUT AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND OBLITERATE ALL LIFE WITHIN AN EIGHTY-THREE LIGHT−YEAR RADIUS.
DO NOT BE AFRAID.
THERE IS STILL TIME.
It was of course impossible to save the planet. The peoples of Adjumir and its sister planet Hadda knew this, and after the initial shock they reached the conclusion that if they could not save their worlds, the next best thing they could do was try to save their people.
Thus, Exodus was born.
This is a timeline of Exodus, beginning one hundred (T−100) years before the supernova that would eventually kill the planet:
T−100: Emergency Planetary Assemblies created to write new constitution, dedicating society to evacuation and repopulation among the stars. Acceleration of Adjapar terraforming project (safely located some two hundred light years outside the blast radius of Lhonoja) and installation of cryofacilities on nearby moon to house transitory population until completion of terraforming (est. 650 years until arcology stage, 910 years until breathable atmosphere). Acceleration of solar swarm deployment around local star, with the objective of creating a self-sustaining energy-manufacturing process for evacuation vessel construction on planet Asoi. Diplomatic activity on all friendly Accord worlds stepped up to find refugee worlds/habitats where Adjumiri citizens may find safe harbour. Introduction of random lottery system to choose evacuees for eventual Exodus flights.
T−91: powered by solar swarm, Asoi workshops commence mothership manufacture. Completion of first vessel in T−84. Space elevator construction commences on surfaces of Adjumir and Hadda for population transfer to mothership, completion of first elevator in T−86.
T−85: demographic slump under way on Adjumir. Steep decline in birth rate stabilises at 0.7 births per fertile female, declining again at T−10 to 0.2 births. Some demographic slump is desirable, reducing the overall number of expected casualties when the world dies. However, an overall collapse of the population too soon reduces the number of healthy youths available for evacuationin +/−25 years, thus decreasing the viability of new communities among the stars.
