“Good.” Te held out ter hand. “Shall we?”
Later, I said:
“I cannot remember the name of my parents. A few archivists helped me find what records remain, but when I tell my story, they are always just ‘my parents’. My leg sometimes hurts – whatever forces transcribed me clearly struggled to work out what to do with my tibia. On the one hand, my other leg offered a template, as did my genetic code. Then again, DNA itself is never just as simple as a command that must be executed; it is a cascading dance of on-and-off, as subject to environmental stimuli as wind or rain.
“When the quarantine teams found me on theMyrmida, they pointed guns, screamed at me, seemed to understand already that I was a monster. A murderer, at least. All those dead bodies scattered around the ship – and not just dead; there had been…thingsdone to them. Dreadful things. And there I was, absolutely fine, so of course I was to blame, and perhaps I am. Perhaps… there are certain errors in how I… perceive some things. Anyway, they put me in a prison for a while, but a Xi prison after the fires of Hasha-to was wonderful. Good food, a comfy bed, all the readingyou could ask for – incredible! – a psychologist to talk to twice a week. I’d never had anyone listen so intently before. At first I said nothing because I knew it was a trap, and then after a while I said everything, just couldn’t stop talking, and the authorities couldn’t actually prove I was a killer but they knew there was something not right, so then they sent me to a lab. At first, I quite enjoyed being there. There was a thing in me, a thing I think had always been there, but was now…
“?… I was curious.
“So curious.
“And if people answered my questions, explained to me what they were doing when they took my blood, my skin, scanned my brain, asked what I thought, what I felt… I didn’t mind being there at all. They let me read their papers, study their tools, learn about the drugs they pumped into me. But one day I think I said something, something that made them uncomfortable, or I did something or…
“?… I am always doing something a little bit wrong, you see.
“Not quite wrong enough that I know what it is, or that people bother to tell me.
“Just… a thing I was supposed to understand, and didn’t, and so you see, I am… just wrong.
“I tend not to have very strong feelings, but if everyone around me is feeling something, I mean, of course I pick up on it, and by then everyone was starting to feel very, very frightened, and well, one day they decided not to answer my questions any more, and it was like something in me… became dysregulated. Let’s call it that. Dysregulation. Hadja is very concerned that I stay grounded, centred. Not too curious, not too sad, not too happy, not too… dysregulated.
“Sometimes, when the lights went out, parts of me… It’s as if my body also sometimes forgets what it is meant to be, along with my mind. So the scientists in the lab, they were scared, and scared people don’t treat each other like they’re people. They didn’t jokewith me any more, didn’t tell me about their worries, their plans for an evening meal. Gave me papers I’d already read, to shut me up, keep me occupied, whispered to each other behind their hands.
“The first time I escaped, all the lights were out and I remember just looking at the walls and thinking, goodness, that doesn’t look very real, does it? All those atoms, and mostly just space between them, and it didn’t occur to me that things that people took for granted – gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces – were important, somehow. So I walked out. They shot me when they found me, a few kils away from the lab. Lethal force, but that wasn’t what actually stopped me. It was the light. It was the rising sun. It drove away all uncertainties, made solid things real again, and so being real, of course I was also real, which made it easier to gun me down.
“I woke up in the morgue.
“In the dark, in the black, my body forgets again. Forgets the rules of this universe, forgets how it is meant to behave. It defaults back to how it was when they found me in theMyrmida, as if captured in that moment. The Xi are good people. After I woke up, some of the scientists wanted to shoot me again, just to see what happened. I will admit, I was curious too – but by then it had all grown a little too repetitive, a little too dull, pain without result, so I ran away again, and this time knew how to avoid the light.
“I did some things, after that. The kind of things that mean there is a Major on Xihana who comes to check on me every few weeks, make sure I amstable, keeping to my isle. It’s why Hadja is floating outside the door. Because of the things. They like to make sure I am observed. When no one is looking, that’s when I forget what it is to be… acceptable. Normal. Part of this world. Does this upset you?”
Gebre contemplated this question for a while, ter shoulder pressed against mine. “No,” te concluded at last. Then, as if it were the be-all and end-all of all that there could ever be to say: “I have never been afraid of death.”
So we lay in each other’s arms, for a little while more.
Chapter 13
This is how I left Gebre, the last time – what I then imagined was my final time – all those years ago.
Over breakfast, I mumbled: “I live on an island on Xihana, I grow vegetables and musical shells, the people of the peninsula have different songs for the seasons and the direction of the wind, and yes, the gravity is lighter and the air is thinner, but if I can cope with Adjumir then I think…”
While te loaded the last of ter crates into the waiting hold of theEmni: “There is a visa programme, you see. It is difficult, there are many applications, a lot of bureaucracy, but I think if you and I…”
As we lay together beneath the yellowing flowers of theEmni’s autumnal roof: “I am in every way Mawukana na-Vdnaze. Same DNA, same memories, as much as they can be verified. But all the evidence suggests that Mawukana is dead, and I am a monster. It has been observed that I am… susceptible to expectations. Everyone is, to a certain degree. If everyone around you imagines that you are brilliant, you will try harder to be so; if they think you are a misery, their behaviour will likely make you more miserable and so on. People think that I am broken, even the ones who try to keep me safe – and people safe from me – and their expectations make it very hard to be anything other than broken.”
“I don’t expect you to be a monster,” te replied.
“I know. I am… grateful for that. I am more grateful than you can possibly know.”
Gebre never told me what te imagined of me, but I think perhaps it was gentle, and kind, and I could have fallen for ever into the joy of ter expectation.
And so on that final night, as we lay together in the short hours left before launch: “Come with me,” I blurted.
Te had been tracing the scar on the back of my hand, the scar of my first promotion, electric and raised, and now te stopped, now te looked at me, long and hard, and I could not read what was in ter gaze.
“Come with me,” I repeated, in case I had said it wrong, in case te had imagined the words. “I have done… services to the Xi. I have… utility to them. My island is beautiful, the immunisations won’t be that bad, and there is a community – a growing community – on the planet too. Adjumiris. You don’t have to stay with me, you could… They’d need you too, you know. All across the stars, Adjumiris are building new worlds, new lives, they need people like… Come with me. You don’t have to wait for your number to be called. We have theEmni. We have this ship. I am the safest Pilot you will ever meet, the dark ignores me. There is nothing… there is nothing about me that the dark finds interesting.”
Te sat up, pulling the sheets about terself, eyes fixed on the furthest wall of the room.
