We sat a while and listened, and Gebre tried to teach me the first song – a children’s song – the song of the great forest from which all life had begun and to which all things would one day return. Te hummed a line of notes, which I mangled, so te hummed a simpler line, and in the end simply gave me a three-note drone that rose and fell in time to a steady clapping, over which te called out the beats of the verse.
Hadja watched, and did not join in. Whatever qis interest in being my keeper, music was clearly not on the list.
Then a figure in white robes moved through the hall, holding up a loose collection of clonking wooden chimes, and all music stopped.
Every head turned, every lip sealed, as the Behkdaz processed through the song spire, accompanied only by the soft clonk-clonk of hollow wood. I waited for her to pass, for Gebre to explain, which te did by putting a hand on my arm, whispering: “Let’s move on.”
Te took me to the towntree, towering over a little square a few wiggling alleys from the spire. Seven people stretched arm-to-arm could not have encompassed its trunk, and the branches spilled out from its crown in a blue-grey umbrella of ancient blackened bark. Wooden and silver chimes hung from every twig, singing softly in the breeze, and now that Gebre had pointed them out, I saw more chimes hanging by the occasional door, outside darkened houses and shuttered places, more silver than wood, some tarnished and green, some fresh and sparkling in the afternoon sun.
“Silver for those who have gone to the stars,” te murmured as we stood beneath the softly singing branches of the tree. “Wood for those who have taken Grace, whose song will not be heard again.The Behkdaz are the guides of the way; if you wish, they will help you hold the cup. It is not a decision taken lightly, but when the end comes… it will perhaps be taken. Better to die in Grace than burn when the planet does.”
We stood together a while more, listening to the chimes singing their silver songs, before Gebre clicked ter tongue, murmured: “Come. There is more for you to see.”
Thus, a day spent in Lud.
I drank a variety of mostly foul drinks that my stomach was in no state to digest; I rolled dice against two elders who laughed and said I did not know my good fortune. I was taken to the old stone gate behind the cemetery, through which younglings passed when they reached maturity and chose their name, and through which the dead were carried when their time was done and only their name remained. In a “shop” – Gebre still struggled to find the right word, a place of speciality was the best te could settle on – te explained at great length the meaning of the crowns and gowns that you must choose for the defining rituals of your life. Here, trousers adorned with feathers that seemed black until they flashed a dazzling blue, for wearing when you were in a time of change and learning. Here, the green headdress of one who wishes to be bound for ever to another as kinn; here, the yellow-red robe of the scholar who has completed a task of great learning.
Ideally, of course, you should go into the forest and find your own feathers, make your own garment. But the realities of urban living were often such that these ancient practices had to be turned into more abstract rituals, and those who were in a time of change were commonly invited up into the local fields to sleep and sing beneath the stars on auspicious nights beside the jolmwood fire, as a sign of their contemplation and rebirth.
Aware of my unsettled stomach and the weight of gravity pressing down against the support of my mechanical exoskeleton,Gebre invited me to eat a simple meal of some fluffy mass te called “bread” – yet another translation I felt I had to question – on the edge of a sparkling stream of cool water, served with drinks of crushed ice and barely spiced mashed vegetables.
“It is food fit for babies,” te admitted, “but I do not think your stomach can appreciate our delicacies.”
Te told me about ter work, sorting, cataloguing, saving what te could from thousands of years of planetary history. “When I began,” te mused, “I thought every single thing was precious, and died inside at the thought of leaving things behind. Then I realised that this was nonsense, and instead started focusing on saving only the most extraordinary, most fragile of artefacts. Now I am more circumspect. I realise that it is important to also save some kitsch – do you understand this word, ‘kitsch’? Tempting to save only those things that represent the greatest craft, the most extraordinary beauty, but of course the reality is that such things do not accurately or fully tell the story of my people. My people, you see, also love a little kitsch.”
“I live on an island by myself, and only a few people visit me. I do not have much of much, but I have a bowl with yellow flowers on it that was painted by the offspring of a friend called Yulin. It is very badly done, but I treasure it.”
“That’s it!” te blurted. “That’s it! You understand! We must be careful not to give our descendants the impression that it’s all micro-mosaicking and diamond-form glassware!”
I told ter about some of the worlds I’d visited.
About Va, where they believed the written word to be so sacred that it could only be inscribed on gold, silver or pearl. (The digital word, however – they shrewdly decided not to concern themselves too much with the holiness or otherwise of that, and thus civilisation did not entirely collapse.)
About Kzichido, where peace had reigned for centuries, and how disappointing this was to everyone involved, who had been raised to believe in war as honour, honour as life, and who thus hadto resort to endless convoluted sporting activities and ritualised battles to give themselves something to do in these long, wretched years of contemplative calm.
About Okopuatji, where I had experienced the worst space-lag of my life, the average day lasting thirty-five hours, which extraordinary length everyone seemed to take for granted, reaching the end of their eleven-and-a-half-hour work day with a merry cry of “And now we shall party!” and goodness how they did.
“Party? For how long?”
“Eleven hours!”
“Eleven hours? Of just… just partying?”
“Music, alcohol, dance…”
“Every day?”
“It felt that way.”
“Sounds exhausting!”
“It is! They say the long sleep cycle makes up for it, but I think they’re lying to themselves, because the things they do, the madness at the end of the day, they call it disinhibition but I don’t think it can be…”
I did not tell ter about the Shine, and te did not know to ask. And in this way, the day drifted towards evening, and I was laughing, and so was te, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed in this way, until Hadja, who had been almost entirely silent up to this point, to the degree that I had begun to forget qis presence, declared, loud enough to make my ears shudder:
“WE WILL RETURN TO THEEMNINOW!”
The sun was not yet set, but its descent towards the horizon was throwing long shadows across the town, stretching out the length of the song spire like a moving dial and catching crimson shadows in the playing burble of the water. For a moment I considered arguing; then I did not, and with a creak of exoskeleton and an ache of muscles, I rose.
