“I knew the Xi made living ships, but gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous! I imagine you feel like nothing can harm you when youfly something as fabulous as this.”
“TheEmniis robust,” I replied. “He is constantly healing himself; he can even regenerate his external carapace from near-arcspace acceleration. If looked after properly, he could fly for centuries.”
“I love him – oh I love him! And is it true these kinds of ships have near-perfect internal recycling? Air, water…”
“He runs at near-total efficiency, yes.”
“Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”
Our wanderings had taken us to the command deck – little more than a round hollow swollen out of the forward habitation quarters – and there, in a rare square of hard lines and cold metal, was the Pilot’s chair. Gebre moved towards it carefully, as if it might be contaminated with the lingering traceries of something black, something slippery, before looking up with fingers raised, a dance that I was coming to understand requested permission.
I nodded, which gesture had no meaning for ter, so instead clicked my tongue once in assent. Ter face split into a giant, toothy smile – though whether at the permission or my growing skills with Adjumiri colloquial, I could not say – and te rested ter hand on the back of the chair.
“Oh,” te said. “It’s really rather squishy.”
“Squishy?”
“As in… soft, comfortable? Do you know these words?”
“Ah, yes. Squishy. I had not heard that before.”
“Well. Good, I suppose, to make the Pilot comfortable. And this…” Te indicated the waiting crown of wires hanging off the back of the chair, the far thinner tendrils of the neuro-fibral connectors withdrawn into their sheaths, the interior recently scrubbed with antibacterial gel and left to dry.
“The Pilot’s interface.”
“You put it on your head?”
“Yes.”
“And what happens then?”
“The navcomm engages the bio-mechanical processor. Machine and mind working together to guide the ship. No one has yet worked out definitively why arcspace navigation requires an organic component, though a lot of blustering happens in certain pseudo-scientific circles. The experiments are hard to perform to test hypotheses – in arcspace, instruments fail; studies tend to return nonsense results.”
“Does it hurt?”
“A bit. When you first connect.”
“And when you’re navigating? In arcspace, I mean. If it’s not too rude to ask – is it rude to ask?”
“It is hard to express.” I shrugged. “At the time, everything is crystal clear, precise. The computer provides a sense of destination; all you have to do is let the process run. It is almost peaceful, even. But after, when we return, it is as if I was dreaming. There is always a sense of loss. Of something missing, a thing I have seen but cannot name. Does that make sense?”
“As much as anything, yes.”
“I am told that my experience is… anomalous. Many Pilots report experiencing things that… that are different. No one ever tells the same story.”
“But you find it peaceful.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re still flying? On Adjumir a Pilot is allowed to fly only once; twice on a round trip if absolutely no other alternative is available. If you are numberless, you can volunteer to Pilot and may be considered, but even then, the odds of actually being chosen are low. But you… you keep on flying and you don’t appear to be…” Another dance of fingers, grasping at uncomfortable notions.
“Mad?” I suggested, and then, as Adjumiri never has one word when three will suffice: “Insane? Deranged? Reckless?”
“Yes,” te mused. “Something like that.”
“It is a little more complicated than that. I am… scared to tellyou.”
“Why?”
