I licked my lips, looked down at Rencki, looked up at Tapaziao, felt a thing inside me, the old familiar error, the old familiar shame, knowing there were things I was meant to say, sounds that were considered appropriate, just out of reach. Tried to remember the old phrases, the ones that Gebre had taught me as we sat in the shade of theEmni, blurted: “Would you share words with me, beneath a western star?”
Tapaziao’s ministrations to the broken mech stopped, eyebrows rising, free hand tapping out a question in hand-speak, a query I didn’t fully understand. Seeing my ignorance, ze lowered zyr fingers again and murmured: “Nearly right. Eastern star is the way of asking. Beneath the eastern star, Wickashtay and Mangee swore to speak the truth, no matter what, no matter what pain it might bring. I didn’t think they taught these things to off-worlders.”
“I’ve been here before,” I replied. “I was taught by… by someone I knew.”
“You’ve been here before, so you left here before,” Tapaziaomused. “How strange, that you came back. Was it to die, or did you think you could do something that mattered?”
“We may speak frankly?” A single click of assent, a slight incline of zyr metal fingers. “The drones are failing?” I asked.
“Everything’s failing,” ze replied with a little ripple of hand-speak that I took to be a kind of shrug. “We built redundancies into our systems, of course – the granaries are full, the batteries are charged, everything will keep working until it no longer can – but the Edge is coming, eating away at the satellites, filling the sky with storms. Only so much people can do.”
“You are numberless?”
“My number was called.” Ze said the words as if ze was describing getting a bit of a cold, a slight seasonal sniffle. “But I told them no thank you. I am old enough that I couldn’t imagine myself going to another world, trying to build something new. They said it’s important that we have elders in the new places, the new stars, important that there are people who remember how things were. Who can teach us also how we die. Well. If it matters so much, I said, give my number to some other old sod, and they did, no doubt. And they did. I didn’t tell anyone, of course. Not back then. We don’t talk about the numbers, you see. It’shuthto ask – you know this word?Huth? You might say… unacceptable. That is not strong enough, ‘unacceptable’, but I think you know that.”
“You will work until the end?” I asked.
Another dance of fingers; another ripple of nothing much, of thoughts that have passed and do not need to be considered again. “I think so. I’ve read all the articles, listened to the commcasts, and I’m still not clear whether I’ll burn or die of radiation poisoning – maybe even suffocate, if the seas boil. It sounded quick, but people use ‘quick’ in the context of Exodus, in the context of waiting over a hundred years for our world to die, so I do not think they mean ‘quick’ in the way I’d like it to be. If it hurts too much, I have my flask of Grace. These days the Behkdaz are handing out the stuff soon as look at them. I remember when it used to be different – youused to have to convince them that you really, really knew what you were talking about when you said it was time to die.”
I wondered what someone who was not broken, who was not an imperfect copy of an imperfect person, would say to such things, but in the end Tapaziao didn’t seem to mind that I said nothing at all.
Tapaziao dropped us off at Millopix a little after midnight.
The towntree in the central square was bent over with the weight of chimes, silver and wood, hanging off its drooping branches. A constant tingling of tarnished metal, a gentle knocking, a soft clonk-clonk, a few chimes cracked from storm and rain, stained with time.
Tapaziao stood in the open back of zyr vehicle, as if ze could not bring zyrself to leave it. “There used to be a shuttle to Kiskol,” ze declared, eyes flickering around the silent square. “Ran every hour in the day, and you could request it at night too. Don’t know if it’s still working. If it hasn’t been hit by lightning or fizzled out when the drones stopped or left to rot when people… you should still be able to call it. If you can’t ping it, try going to the song spire – there’s a hardline for folks who aren’t on the network.”
“Thank you,” Rencki replied, and:
“Thank you,” I said, and tried to find other words, words that Gebre might have approved of. What was the protocol for saying goodbye, on Adjumir? There had been patterns of “we will meet again in starlight” and “may your song be sung in the great forest” – but they had been things you said when there was still hope of departure, when eighteen years stood between you and the end of the world. They were not appropriate farewells to the living dead.
Perhaps Adjumir did not have anything appropriate, because Tapaziao was already sealing zyr truck back up, already prodding the engines back to life, already heading away into the dark, alone with a load of broken drones.
We walked through the town, towards the song spire.
I wasn’t sure how far we were from Lud, if we were even on the same continent, but the architecture had a different style from the stepped order of those streets. Bio-formed houses melded into each other, tangled balconies of bowered branches twining together and curving solar-glass windows glinting in the memory of the refraction crystals from which they had been grown. Neither was the song spire familiar, being barely a spire at all. Instead a hollow bowl had been dug into the earth, rimmed with stepped seating, and across its top a stretched lid of crimson fabric, still glistening from the evening rain, so that the music of this place would always be half sheltered, half given to the wind. I stared down into it, no lights burning at its heart, no voices raised in song, while Rencki tried to call up the shuttle to Kiskol.
“No answer,” qe sighed. “But I’ve put in our request on the auto-call.”
“Do you think it will come?”
“Perhaps. Local system failures are broad enough that it is hard to diagnose remotely. I suggest we wait until sunrise and then assess further. You should sleep. I will watch.”
There was nothing new in this suggestion.
I lay down to sleep beneath an aurora sky, and do not think I slept at all.
Chapter 17
In the morning, the shuttle did not come.
I listened to unfamiliar birds calling out to the hot sun – too hot, too sticky, thunder rumbling in the distance, too early in the day for there to already be the threat of storms – while Rencki tried bombarding the comms.
No answer from transport authorities.
No answer from the local vigil house.
I ate ship rations and waited, legs dangling over the side of one of the stepped edges of the song spire.
