Eventually, it was more than that – a view-blocking, world-blocking, day-smothering wall that forced us to a halt on the side of the road, turned the land beneath us into a blackened river, broken only by distant stabs of lightning. I wanted to step outside, to reach my hand into it, taste it, open my mouth and drink in the sky. Knew that Rencki, now silent in Zanlan’s lap, would not approve. Wondered what people would see if they saw us now – a tiny bubble of light caught in the middle of the day-become-night downpour.
Zanlan slept, the roar of thunder and rocking of rain a familiar thing. Ranwha played music. It was old music, he said – music made before Exodus. There were only two kinds of music made now, he added. The music of those who had escaped, already changing with the inflections of alien worlds, the rhythms of strange, different cultures; and the songs of those who were left behind. He didn’t like either, so he played the old tunes.
He used this word – “alien”. It tripped off his tongue, a familiar, habitual thing, and he didn’t seem to notice.
I looked to Rencki, who to all intents and purposes appeared to be asleep in the child’s lap, and who was not sleeping.
After a while, the storm eased to merely a torrent.
Ranwha checked his computer, tutted at what he saw, said: “Weather sats are down, but I’d guess this will keep going into the night.”
“I agree,” Rencki opined from the back seat, not bothering to open qis eyes or feign the movement of qis jaw. “It is most probable.”
“I don’t think we’ll make it to Millopix without recharging – not in this. There’s a village nearby. I have some friends there.”
“Are you sure they’re still alive?” I blurted, and immediately felt embarrassed to have been so direct; but Ranwha’s fingers danced in a kind of shrug.
“We shall see.”
He turned off the music, and onwards we drove.
I did not keep track of time in the rain.
The world outside was moving shadows and illusionary distances, lights looming in some far-off place that was neither earth nor sky, then disappearing again, swallowed by the storm. I had not imagined weather could carry on so long, or be so deep. The energy of the distant nova was already starting to cook the atmosphere, heat up the system from within – I had not thought I would be here, alive, to see it.
It felt like a strange kind of honour. An ugly privilege to be a witness.
I thought I could hear Gebre whispering in my ear:Only matters if you stay alive to speak of it.
Then Rencki spoke, and qe used neither Adjumir, Normspeak nor Xiha. Instead, the old language, the one that tasted like vinegar on my lips: Mdo-sa.
“We’re off-course,” qe said. “We’re a long way off-course.”
“What’s that?” blurted Ranwha, his knuckles white on the wheel, eyes fixed on the limited vision of the road ahead. “What did qe say?”
“Qe monitors my vitals,” I blurted. “My body – I’m not used to the gravity, the air. Qe said my blood pressure was high.”
I could hear the lie, awful, stumbling on my lips. Hoped that my rusty Adjumiri would hide it, my bumbling efforts mistaken for poor language skills rather than a lack of imagination.
“Do you need to pull over?”
“How far are we from your friends?”
“Not far now. A few tocks at most.”
“Be careful,” Rencki murmured, still in the language of the Shine. And then, the most dangerous of all commands: “Be curious.”
“It’s fine,” I told Ranwha. “It’s fine. I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”
He neither clicked his tongue nor spoke in reply.
The village was not a village, but a little cluster of buildings around a farm.
A huddle of speeders and trucks, ranging from tiny two-seaters up to lumbering modified beasts, were parked in the yard before the long, low central house. A broken wind turbine sat storm-torn behind a high solar-panelled barn, and as we approached, a burst of creatures I had never seen before, antlered and low to the earth, bounded away.
The rain was easing into a merely soaking afternoon, the light muddled and muted as if humbled by the strength of the storm. We pulled up on a patch of white gravel beside a garden of wind-blasted trellises and cracked glass, and Ranwha said: “Seems like someone’s inside,” and didn’t look at me as he spoke, and didn’t wake his child, sleeping in the back.
He got out of the vehicle, and I stayed seated a moment as Rencki, gently – so very gently – uncurled from Zanlan’s form.“This is wrong,” qe whispered in Mdo-sa. “I am pinging emergency comms. Comms are not responding. Widening the band. Transmitting distress beacon. Transmitting.”
