“It may change your expectations of me.”
“I don’t expect anything from you.”
“I know. I like that. It is… hard to express how grateful I am for that.”
“Hard because of language?” te barked. “Or hard because of feelings?”
“A bit of both.”
Te puffed both ter cheeks out, a sign of annoyance – though one, I had learned to understand, that wasn’t necessarily directed at me. Clicked ter tongue in the roof of ter mouth. Turned and turned again to look around the cabin, taking in its polished walls, warm to the touch, the faint smell of soil after rain drifting through the vents, the Pilot’s chair. Ter eyes, as they wandered, took in Hadja too, my ever-present companion, loitering a little too close for comfort near the door. Ter gaze stayed on Hadja a moment longer than was necessary, before returning at last to me.
“Mawukana na-Vdnaze,” te said, “we should sing.”
Hadja objected.
“Absolutely not!” qe barked. “Leaving the base is unacceptable, it is—”
“We’ll be back before sunset,” Gebre assured the bobbing quan. “And you can of course come with us and keep watch.”
“Mawukana should not leave the safety of the launch site! It is against protocol, it is—”
“Hadja,” I snapped, a sharpness to my tone that surprised even me, set my heart beating fast. “There is a balance to be struck. Between safety and… and risk. Always a balance. Yes?”
Hadja processed this statement in, I have no doubt, a microsecond, but lingered a while longer to let the full extent of qis disapproval settle in. Then: “Very well. But I will not move from your side, and if we are not back by sunset, I will incapacitate youuntil further assistance can be found.”
“Fair enough.”
“Is it?” Gebre blurted, and I smiled and clicked my tongue, and on we went.
The people of Adjumir love to sing.
They sang long before Exodus came, but at the arrival of the Slow and qis declaration of the end of the world, they really stepped up their musical efforts.
This was, Gebre assured me, largely an instrument of social control.
Cohesion – cohesion and togetherness. That was what Exodus required. The old song festivals of a few thousand people getting together every four years now swelled into endless churning rituals of celebration, yearning and praise. From the solo night-callers, wandering place to place to sing the ballads of the blackened moon, to the great gatherings beneath the song spires where forty thousand people would raise their voices as one, the message was clear. We are one, we are the people of Adjumir, the people of the forest. Some may live and some may die – some may make it to the stars and some may perish in the fires of Lhonoja, but our songs will live on.
“In Exodus,” Gebre explained, “we are taught only how to sing songs for each other, to celebrate each other, never just ourselves.”
We were sitting in the back of a flatbed speeder, pressed between empty barrels of food and drink supplied to the landing crews from far-off fields, the soft hum of the truck’s suspensor field rising a little as we whisked away from the launch pad. As we rose up the walls of the valley, the trees about us grew straighter, stiffer, spined with thorns. I wheezed a little as my lungs struggled in the changing air, neck aching from the press of gravity. Hadja bobbed at my back, stoutly refusing to offer any aid, but Gebre put one finger on my forehead, a gesture whose meaning I did not comprehend, asked if I wanted to go back.
“No. I would like to see something of this world, even if it’sonly for a day.”
Te seemed to approve of this statement, and why would te not? Ter life was given over to the memory of Adjumir, as if the world were already dead.
The nearest settlement was called Lud.
The houses were stacked boxes, rising away from each other to form terraces punctuated by green. Every roof held a garden, some overflowing with hanging tendrils draping down around windows and doors; others decked out with comfy chairs and budding fruit trees beneath which the slumbering residents might wait for the end of the world.
Long avenues bisected the town, pierced by tight, tangled alleys through which the rising heat of the day could not penetrate. On these avenues were buildings that Gebre called shops, though Hadja insisted this was a barely adequate translation, the least-bad that the linguists could do. “They are a calling,” Gebre explained, when I struggled to understand more. “The dice house, the bath house, the house of learning, the poet’s house, the cloth house, the grocer and the physician. They are called to their vocations. We are Adjumiri; we serve each other.”
“Do you… pay?” I stumbled, realising as I did that I was unclear on the correct verb in this language.
“Pay? As in… do we perform our services for the whole?” te asked. “Of course we do. I serve the Institute. My service is given to my people.”
I wondered for a moment if I should try to explain the economy of Tu-mdo, the Shine, ideas of value and worth that were clearly strangers here. Then again, if Gebre’s number was called, te was hardly going to be shipped off to a Shine world, and perhaps this was a conversation for another, less pleasant time.
Te took me to the song spire, a tower of white basalt grown in the centre of the town. We were too late for the dawn songs, too early for the evening, but the music never ceased in these crystalhalls, whether they were snatches of dirges sung for those who had departed to the stars or swellings of chorus from little gatherings practising for the harvest festival.
