“What do you feel, when you go to Adjumir?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you want to go.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
“No. I am told it is because I want to make a difference. That I am a ‘good man’. A lot of people want to help in some way, but very few do. I think it is because they think that ‘helping’ is somehow ‘fixing’. Somehow being a hero. But no one is a hero, against a supernova. And everyone is too. Everyone who did anything at all, no matter how small, because that’s all change is – a great big enormity made up of a vast, uncounted mass of tiny actions. But that’s not what people want to feel. They want to feel… special. A special kind of hero. I don’t feel that way. What I do is irrelevant. And also if I did not do it, things would be worse, so it matters to do it. Matters, does not matter. Do you understand me? It is… pleasing that people are happy to see me, when I go to Adjumir. It makes me feel… nice. But I think the truth is that the world is going to die. I have never seen a world die before.”
The psychologist made a note, and I knew I had said the wrong thing and everyone in the room was a little bit afraid. Frightened enough that they did not try to stop me going back to Adjumir.
“You can fly more sorties than any of our people,” sighed the Major. “You are safer, more reliable, more accurate. The dark, when you enter it, seems not to perceive you. Seems utterlyoblivious to your presence. As if you were already part of it. Which I suppose in a way you are.”
Then I said I felt more comfortable on my island than in the black, and she knew I was lying but chose not to remark on it, since that would only make everyone more unhappy than they already were.
Chapter 12
For the next year, I flew. And every time I returned to Adjumir, the area around each landing pad had grown. From simple security fence and basic operational buildings, tents began to appear. Cabins and muddy streets, overloaded composters struggling to handle the weight of sewage and crooked overhangs of solar screens spilling across the valleys and over rooftops like a fungal growth as people began to drift towards the pads.
Some of them were simply curious, day-trippers come to point and stare at the odd shape of theEmniand the other atmos-capable vehicles that didn’t need to dock at distant elevator ports. Some were workers, come to support the growing flow of logistics through the dock gates and off the planet. A few were protesters, carrying signs and blasting their homilies through the open links of the fence.
“Exodus lies! Exodus lies! Exodus lies!” they chanted.
Sometimes, at night, when I was in the right hemisphere, I could see Lhonoja. I didn’t know it until it was pointed out to me, half expecting to see two stars instead of their light melded into one. It was ten years until they would fuse and explode; another seven before the shock from the blast would strike Adjumir and the light of the star would finally go out. Until then, the Lovers shone still, normal, peaceful, unobtrusive.
“Exodus lies, Exodus lies!” shrilled the little handful of protesters by the gate. “Aliens stealing from our world!”
“Alien” was a word I had learned in Adjumiri. It was an almost forbidden sound – “off-worlder” or “star traveller” were the correct usages taught in the schools, if only because so many of the students learning these nuances could soon find themselves on another world where they themselves might be the “alien” – a dark, threatening thing. An intruder, a creature of otherness, unwelcome in this space. But as the months crept by and the end of the world drew nearer, more protesters pointed at me and my clearly gravitationally challenged form, and chanted “Alien, alien, alien!”
“We shall now move away,” Hadja declared, and it was not a matter for debate.
The last people to come to the launch pads were the numberless, those whom the lottery had not yet chosen for Exodus. Little huddles of families and friends, waiting silently in the mouths of their tents while the medical workers tutted and fussed and worried about outbreaks of gastrointestinal disease across the growing camps. Some were old; some were children. In those days, they were not so many. I was told the camps around the bases of the equatorial space elevators were far bigger, almost city states with mayors and security forces to keep the numberless from rushing the lifts. In those days, such incidents were still rare. There was still time for their numbers to be called; for their lives to be saved.
I looked for Gebre on every trip, and did not find ter.
I wondered if ter number had come up, if even now te was queuing at the base of one of the great elevators, waiting to be carried into the sky, up to the open hull of a waiting mothership. I wondered which world te would end up on, whether it was for the cryofacilities of Adjapar and a promise of one day – centuries from now – being reunited with ter precious artefacts, or whether they were giving ter the immunisations for travel to another world, ter lungs, heart and bones altering in flight as te headed to a place where people only knew one word for “apology”.
In the end, it turned out to be none of the above, for on my twelfth trip, there te was.
“By the fires of the abyss,” te breathed, “they’re still letting you fly?”
A jolt of disappointment – a part of me had hoped that my fantasies were true, that te was already in the stars, already saved.
A far stronger jolt of something else – something like joy – to see ter face.
“Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra,” I exclaimed. “I saw our cargo manifest contained the ritual robes of a long-vanished forest cult, and wondered if that was you.”
My Adjumiri was much better, and te told me so.
I said thank you – the “thank you” of deepest appreciation, rather than the Assembly Adjumiri “thank you” of formal acknowledgement that I had learned on my first trip, and asked if te would like to tour the ship.
Te said yes, te would find that very interesting, and though ter voice was polite and level, ter hands danced in the language of childlike excitement.
I took ter around theEmni. He was in his late-autumn phase, his energy depleted by so many runs across the galaxy. When we returned to Xihana, I would have to leave him in the storm deserts for a few weeks, let the daytime sun bathe him, the night-time water wash him clean while the bio-engineers scrubbed his decks and changed out his nutrient tanks, ready to bloom again for another flight between the stars. For now, however, the soft buds of his corridors were closed and the ivy tangle about my bed was shedding its final leaves.
This did not stop Gebre clapping ter hands with delight as we moved through theEmni’s decks.
