I watched, having nothing better to do, nowhere else to go. Gebre seemed to think that having me trail around in ter wake added a certain authenticity to ter outrage, provided an ally even, though I had no position and hadn’t said a word.
“Outrageous!” te fumed as the door to the launchmaster’s office shut on us. “Don’t they understand protocol?”
“What exactly are these artefacts of cultural significance?” I asked. At my back, Hadja vented a soft discharge of heat, but did not speak.
Gebre’s eyes flickered from qim to me, and then, perhaps with nothing better to do, te straightened up to ter full, somewhat gravity-compressed height and said: “If we get something to eat, will you vomit on my priceless treasures?”
I did not vomit upon ter priceless treasures, though Hadja warned me against trying all but the blandest of meals until my stomach settled in.
We sat with our legs tucked under a low cloth-covered table, holding black ceramic cups of a shockingly acidic drink Gebre informed me was called kol and was a vital guest-greeting beverage that I had to consume – little sips were acceptable – while te held forth. Te had straight, thick black hair that te wore in a tight wound braid at the back of ter head, skin like a warm dawn on a winter’s day. Ter eyes were a sinking, sombre brown, ter face round and serious, ter shoulders broader than mine, voice deep, certain of its truths.
Te talked a lot with ter hands, as all Adjumiris did, fingers dancing in a language I at first took to be just another sign of Adjumiri’s high affect – if Adjumiri dinners didn’t end with weeping and/or declarations of undying love, it was considered something of a tedious affair – but that I later read as a habit of the hand-speak that all children were taught before they learned to shape words with their tongues. At first te spoke too fast, and I had to blurt, “Sorry?” and “What?” to every third or fourth sentence, until te began to recognise the look of confusion in my eyes and slowed down, clarifying what words te could with their nearest Normspeak equivalent. Te seemed to find this distasteful, blurting: “Normspeak is all very well for communicating between cultures, but in its effort to be comprehensible it is also crude! Disgustingly crude!”
Te said te found my face hard to read, asked if all off-worlders were as flat in their features as I. I replied that on Xihana it was also said I smiled less, frowned less than was the cultural norm, but that by Haima standards my features were practically verbose.
“You’ve been to many worlds, then?”
“More than the average, I believe.”
“But you are a Pilot. Is this your last flight?”
“It is… complicated. But please, you were explaining the importance of a cup.”
“Not a cup – a set of three. The three cups that were made specifically for the signing of the South Zyonhan Peace, with the fingerprints of the signatories still visible in the ceramic. Children study these things in school, of course, but sometimes you have to see, you have to hold, do you understand? You have to touch the uniform of a soldier who died, you have to appreciate how heavy the gun was when it was lifted, you have to see the fragments of the ship when it was blasted apart to comprehend how hot the fire burned, you have to hold the cups that sealed the peace – this is not just about the archaeology, you see, it is about theemotion, about connection with those who went before. The history that made us was already an abstract thing, and now that we are leaving this world it’s going to become worse than that. It’s going to become… tedious textbooks, or romantic stories, not a thing that wefeel. We will not understand how it is still inus, how it shaped us and our ancestors and is shaping us still. It’s not just about the damn cups – it’s about making our memoriesreal. Do you understand?”
“Perhaps. Yes.”
“I’m not convinced that you do. Perhaps it is your face.”
“And these artefacts… they are going to Adjapar?”
“Yes. First to storage, then to a new institute on the planet’s surface, when the time comes. There are already generations of Adjumiris being born who have never seen the surface of this world, never breathed its air. What will they understand of us? What will their children understand? We have a duty to try and explain, to keep some sort of connection. On hundreds of worlds light years away Adjumiri children are growing up who, through the simple act of being far from home, may be told that they arelesser. That their people did not make and build and dream like the natives of their new worlds. We must preserve something – whatever we can – to show them that this is not so. That is my calling.” A word in Adjumiri –calling. In Normspeak it wouldhave just been “job”, a profession, a labour done for reward of one nature or another. On Adjumir, the word had changed meaning with Exodus, every act, every moment of breath infused with purpose, with a higher goal. There were no “jobs” in the last days of Adjumir, only greater purposes waiting to be fulfilled.
A question, of course, just on the edge of asking. I tried to find the best way around it, to force Adjumiri words into some sort of tactful order. “How do you choose what stays and what goes?” And then, the other thing, the thing that you could not take a single step on Adjumir without feeling seeping through your very bones. “How do you decide how much to save? If every crate is a person left behind…”
“It is not,” te snapped, hard and fast, a scholar used to this question and a little afraid of it. “Saving artefacts and saving people require entirely different mechanisms. You are the Pilot of a cargo ship, bio-formed to support the perfect environmental conditions for transport. Your ship is not engineered for the gene therapies and immunisation packets required for human cargo en route to anywhere other than a cryofacility. Your life-support systems could not sustain more than what, a tenhand people? The items we carry – the goods we save – give meaning to millions.Millions. I would happily discard my number if I knew my life could do so much.”
“Has your number been called?”
Te was no longer bristling, no longer fired up with outrage at my ignorance, and simply clicked ter tongue three times in the top of ter mouth and proclaimed: “On Adjumir, you mustneverask someone that question. It is the height of rudeness.”
“I apologise.”
“And you are using the wrong form of ‘apology’ again. There are four forms in Adjumiri. You should have been taught the one that suggests you experience empathy without owning responsibility – a nice, safe kind of apology, obviously the one they’d teach to off-worlders. But you must also know the polite form of ‘violated socialexpectation or contract’ and the deep form of ‘acknowledge the consequences of my personal action’ if you are to really understand. You do not have to understand,” te added, a slight drawing-back of ter voice, a recognition of a difficult thing. “But it is my duty to ensure that people do. You do not need to take it personally.”
Gebre had never been off-world, but ter mind was full of the sounds and songs of a changing culture. The first generations to have been born on other planets were already in their fifties, their children starting to have children, and the songs these generations had made had drifted back to Adjumir, carried in the hollow hulls of the returning motherships and on the commcasts of roaming journalists and scholars. They still sang in Adjumiri, some of the time, but the rhythms were changing, the old lyrics losing their meaning. Artists still spoke of the yellow-spotted sky because they found the pattern of the words nice, not because they understood the ancient stories of Dablwa and Madungnashi and the killing of the great moon-snake; poets wove ballads about Exodus and leaving loved ones behind without ever having set foot on one of Adjumir’s orbital elevators or tasted from the farewell cup. It was not that Gebre disapproved of these new forms of art, per se. Culture was always adapting, always changing, and, with a certain distaste in the corner of ter lips, te accepted that.
“But,” te would mutter, “what is the point of our lives if we are not remembered? What is the point of the stories we make if they do not tell people something true?”
I didn’t have an answer to that, and te didn’t expect me to. Even ter own people struggled sometimes with the strength of ter vision.
Interlude
A note on gender
Gender is irrelevant for quans, for whom replication is a complex dance of modular balancing and operational system optimisation. The use of the pronoun “qe” is a matter of respect – they do not wish to be put in the same category as a bowl of soup or a broken chair.
The aka-aka have one gender – “we”. All of “we” are necessary for the production of more “we”, and all “we” behave differently; what else is there to say? It takes extraordinary efforts to convince an aka-aka that anyone would want to subdivide the one-of-we by trivialities such as quill texture or genital organs.
