I waited the few moments it took qe to realign qis navigational systems, appreciative if nothing else that qe bothered to narrate qis processes out loud. “There a fire burning, ten kils from here,” qe said at last. “Drones are on the way. The nearest relay tower went down in the last storm; signals are intermittent. Maw – this planet is a mess.”
Rencki rarely called me by my name. When we first met, qe had described me as “the subject”, and for a long time, “the subject” I had remained. Everyone seemed uneasy at the idea of investing in my identity, like naming an animal you might one day want to eat. I didn’t know if Rencki had an emotional state known as “fond”. Like all living creatures, qe had predictions of behaviour – profitable, beneficial, mutually enhancing – that qe could categorise as “friendship” or even “good sentiments”, cognitive shorthand for more complex ideas that qe didn’t need to waste time or energy on formulating every time qe saw me. But how strong that shorthand was – how much I was ever simply “Maw, acquaintance/friend?” versus a far more complicated cognitive construction of my identity as “subject/Pilot/danger” – I did not know.
“We knew there’d be planet-side damage before the Edge hit. The Lovers weren’t simply going to collapse and explode in a neat, orderly fashion.”
Rencki clicked once in agreement, qis communication algorithms already running on Adjumiri norms. “I am calling for transport. Transport is not responding. There is a road three kilsthat way.” A tilt of qis long nose towards a wall of spiny reeds. “We shall start walking.”
I clicked my tongue in affirmation, remembering the old feel of it, the stirrings of something digging themselves up from the depths of my memory, and followed qim towards the road.
Thoughts of Gebre.
Inevitably, but of course, thoughts of Gebre.
In the warmth of theEmni, all those years ago, Gebre pressed into my side. “I have had a lot of lovers,” te had said, in the same tone in which te might have marked a student’s academic paper. “I think physical intimacy is important. Especially now. Especially in times like these. Connection, togetherness, belonging – vital, absolutely essential. But of course, love. Love is hardly sensible, is it? The things that people do for love, as they say. Do they say? I think most cultures say it, no? Most places where there is this word ‘love’.”
Implication: that the things people do for love are absurd, damaging, even selfish. I have not seen much in the way of love to pass judgement on this matter, but on an uninformed, instinctive level, I do not entirely disagree.
Gebre barking orders at the launchmaster, exclaiming: “But this is ourhistory!” in a way that seemed to suggest that history meant future, that there could not be one without the other. Te was constantly baffled that people did not understand such things; constantly amazed that they had not thought as deeply as te. Once I murmured: but it isn’t their job, and te sat up and looked amazed. “Thank you,” te exclaimed. “I sometimes forget. ‘Isn’t their job.’ You’re right of course. How terribly strange.”
There is a world – the natives click its name in ultrasonic chirrups, and the peoples of the Accord call it Chulla’s World – that is one of the very few where civilisation evolved aquatically. The challenges of this particular evolutionary path are legion, from the extraction of materials from oceanic depths to the application of heat in the creation of new forms. When they first met the Accord,their ambassador wore a mech-suit with two arms, two legs and a mechanical mouth that could be pulled into great big smiles or enormous curling frowns. Everyone understood this was a crude affectation, utterly unrepresentative of the creature swimming within it – and even then, the organic mind will react to even the most abstract of representations and say, “Now the ambassador is frowning; now I feel sad.” By our relationships with each other we live, by each other we die; that is the only real logical conclusion we may take from this.
The quans often say that organic civilisation is no more and no less than an outsourcing of processing function. Here: this processor brings in the harvest and this processor mines the ore and this processor keeps records and this processor determines the algorithms by which war will be declared and so on and so forth. Civilisation is too large, too myriad, for any one organic unit to do it all, and so we outsource the labour of cognition to other units, and trust that whatever result they return, it is good.
There is a lot of trust, in civilisation. There is a lot of faith in the results returned in each other’s function, and when that faith fails, so does everything else.
And I am not thinking of Gebre.
I am thinking of nothing else.
The road was a little local thing, carrying a single EM strip down the middle for navigation and suspension of passing vehicles. By the time we reached it, tramping through mud and dark and barely animal-scratched pathways, night had fallen and the last of the rain had passed. The aurora spun silently overhead. Too bright, too far from the magnetic poles, a display of light and colour that in another time would have held the prophecies of gods.
And there, rising in the east, was Lhonoja.
The Lovers were no longer an anonymous binary star, one of millions, but a second moon, a bright orb by whose glow I could see the lines of my own hand, the throw of Rencki’s shadow whereit was cast upon the earth. Now the heat of night was steeped in wrongness – not the warmth of summer, but the heat of this other star, its first death throes before the end, already bathing the planet with its imminent demise.
I had stopped in the middle of the road to stare up at this brightness in the sky. Rencki turned to look back at me, followed my gaze, muttered: “We must keep moving,” and nudged the back of my legs to push me on.
In the end, the only transport Rencki could ping was a drone crew, heading in roughly the right direction.
The engineer was an elder by the name of Tapaziao. Tufty white hair stood up from a spotted, sun-baked skull, and three fingers on zyr right hand were missing from some long-ago accident, replaced with tightly articulated metal digits. Ze wore grubby blue overalls, and as ze pulled up, the truck swayed and bobbed unevenly in the road’s suspension field.
“You’re going to Millopix?” ze asked, without particular interest or surprise at the sight of the two mud-soaked figures standing on the edge of the road.
“We are,” Rencki replied, the first time I’d heard qim speak Adjumiri, flawless, matching the engineer’s accent perfectly. “And then to Kiskol, if we can.”
“You off-worlders? Word was a ship came down round here.”
“Our atmos-shuttle, yes.” A shuttle – not a ship. I did not think I had heard Rencki lie before. Qe did it easily. “The lake was the safest landing zone.”
“Is it secure? There are numberless in these parts.”
“It is safe,” Rencki replied, calm and polite, as if the night was not burning and a second moon did not hang in the sky. “We would be grateful for any assistance.”
Tapaziao let the vehicle drive itself, and sat in the back with us, beneath a ceiling hanging with broken drones. Despite the softswaying of the road, ze worked on one, a small unit in zyr lap that ze explained was designed for high-power line work, repairing the pylons that kept on failing now that the storms were getting worse.
“When I was young,” ze growled, “I thought there were too many of these damn things. Drones in the fields, drones on the wires, drones on the roads – you couldn’t even take a crap without wondering whether a drone was going to pop out of the pipes beneath your farting arse. But these days, with things being how they are, they’re the only thing keeping this planet going. And now even they’re going to shit.”
Rencki sat curled at my feet, the little digits of a paw opened wide and splayed across the carapace of a small unit that Tapaziao had laid in front of qim. I couldn’t tell what manner of interfacing the quan was doing, but the engineer seemed perfectly happy to let qim carry on. “I’m no fool,” ze grunted. “If a quan offers to help fix a mech, you say yes.”
