“What do we do?” I breathed.
“I will provide security. I will… Wait. I am connecting, there is—”
A crunch of gravel cut caught my attention, cut Rencki off mid-sentence. The door of the house was open, and in the light of it I could see Ranwha and another shape beckoning us over, their heads tucked beneath the lintel and away from the still-tapping rain. I looked to Rencki for advice, but whether because qe had none or qis processors were occupied elsewhere, qe said nothing.
I climbed slowly out of the vehicle, and heard the gentle pawing of Rencki landing on the earth as qe followed me. We walked towards the waiting figures in the door, and as I opened my mouth to make some sort of polite greeting – some half-snatched words of ritual and thanks – Rencki cried out: “Gun!” and qis tails sparked to electrical life, rearing up to fire.
Too late, of course. The electromagnetic shotgun was primarily a quan-killer weapon, designed to fry electronics, sizzling through Rencki’s systems with a scream of magnetic chaos. Whereas when the scattershot hit me, it merely hurt like the first grasp of an arcship interface as it bedded itself into my skull, followed by an unfamiliar, unwelcome kind of darkness.
Interlude
Apassenger who entered arcspace with blue eyes emerges on the other side of the voyage with green.
A scar on a person’s right hand is now on their left. Or perhaps more – perhaps you come out of the dark and find every organ in your body is inverted, heart moved from one side to the other, spleen switched round. You probably don’t even know until you have some troubles in later life, and the doctor opens your scan with a cry of “Bugger me, have you seen yourself in the mirror lately?!”
A woman once came out of arcspace who knew every detail of her life – except it was not her life, it was the life of another from far, far away, rendered in perfect detail, and when she met with her child at the end of the journey, she stood there baffled and proclaimed: I’m dreadfully sorry, I have no idea whose offspring this is.
It is hard to tell whether the hysteria some people experience on entering and leaving arcspace is a manifestation of the otherness of that interstitial space, or merely the result of centuries of being told how alarming the dark is, how frightening and grave it is to cross between the stars. Some scientists say they can prove – definitively prove – that the madness is caused by some manner of external interference with the broken minds of those who scream, and howl, and tear at their skin and hair – but theirresults are almost never replicable in double-blind studies, and so the question persists.
Most Pilots go mad before they die.
Inconsistently mad – that is the frustration. Sometimes the madness is a wild, murderous thing – a fascination with flesh, a compulsion to rip and rend and see how the tiniest part of the greatest things is made to work. Sometimes it’s a harmless sort of insanity. One Pilot became obsessed with a certain kind of beetle, and was perfectly calm so long as there was always one in the room, happily munching a leaf. Another lost the capacity to understand the difference between me and you, overwhelmed by interconnectedness, and eventually went to live with the noksha, who don’t care for such distinctions anyway. A few created gorgeous, abstract pieces of art – great weavings of scavenged fabric, or paintings made with ink ground from precious stones – in an attempt to express something of their thoughts, some fraction of their meaning, but it’s never quite right. Never quite says enough, they say. Some critics claim they find the work unbearable, impossible to look at, but they probably felt that way even before they saw the final piece.
The Lux refuse to travel in arcspace at all, and instead cross the stars in their vast slowships, sleeping the centuries away on their long voyages. They say there is a kind of purity to going slow. They say that arcspace allows us to forget how extraordinary are the distances we travel, and how tiny we are in the great black. Our egos, our egos, they chant – left unchecked, our egos can grow as big as the distances we traverse. Let us be small. Let us be humble. Let our voices be carried off silently into the dark.
Various words are ascribed to the “otherness”, the unknowable “thing” waiting in the dark. Common ones are: uncanny, malign, sinister, slippery, clawing, cruel, malevolent, mischievous, ominous, perverse, baleful, dire, poisonous, evil.
These are foolish words, for they assume that language has any meaning to the realms of nothingness, where time and space areimpenetrable dreams. There are ideas of morality, ethics – even sentience – that are utterly inappropriate, crushingly crude in their inspace-centricity, and thus a waste of everyone’s time.
Only the Lordat, those priests with shaved heads and endless droning chants designed to inspire as much tedium as possible in the hearer, have got it right. The dark, they say, does not care for such petty concerns as hearts, minds or souls. The great unknowable has one nameable feature, and one alone: it is curious.
Chapter 18
There is a child crying.
Zanlan.
Someone is comforting them, an Adjumiri in still-sodden rain gear, holding the child by the chin and whispering soft words of placation, of calm. Others wait around the room – nine in all, including the one with the gun, the weapon still tucked into the fold of aer arms, aer face set with a deep frown as ae gazed down at me.
Sprawled in a chair from which I was already half fallen, chest burning from the shock of impact and fingers still shaking from the misfires of a nervous system unsure how to cope with all of this, I imagine I looked a picture. More relevant to Zanlan, Rencki was on the floor. Qis bright russet fur was scalded black across the top of qis spine and front of qis neck, where the bulk of the shot had impacted, and qis tails and legs were splayed at an angle that in any creature of muscle and sinew would have been a grotesque, unnatural sight. I lurched towards qim, and was immediately pushed back by one of the assembled peoples, the gun swinging towards me, the threat clear, the consequences lifeless at my feet.
“Qe was safety,” I growled. “Qe kept people safe.”
My Adjumiri did not seem to be adequately communicating what I meant, for brows flickered in confusion, but no one started running, no one called out in fear at the meaning of my speech.Instead, Ranwha leaned forward, ignoring the small furry body at his feet, rested his hands on the arms of my chair so his face was next to mine, breathed: “We know you have a ship.”
I stared into his eyes, saw a man trying to make himself terrifying, make me afraid; nearly laughed, nearly choked on it. “And?” I blurted. “And what of it?”
“You’ll show us. You’ll take us away.”
“Take you where? On Adjapar they’ll arrest you as numberless, songless. The cryotanks are full, there is no capacity for extra lungs, extra bellies. They’ll space you; it’s the only logical thing to do. Or maybe you fly to Namak or Mayxclan and seek asylum. My ship can’t immunise you; they’ll shove you into quarantine, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be dumped in some refugee camp on an isolated moon and left to rot, aproblemto be solved, not people at all. Is that your plan?”
“If that’s what it takes,” he snapped. “We will live. Mychildis going to live.”
So long as Zanlan didn’t look at Rencki’s body, they seemed a little calmer, their face turned away and tears carefully dried on the end of a stranger’s sleeve. I looked round the assembled Adjumiris, murmured: “You’re all numberless? All of you?”
They didn’t need to answer.
“You should take Zanlan away,” I breathed. “Keep them far from this.”
