They don’t mean “bloodied, broken, wounded”.
They mean “other”.
Something uncanny, not quite one thing; a copy with a transcription error that no one can really put their finger on, but you can look at and just know there is a wrongness.
“I am the ghost of Hasha-to,” I mumble, tongue like wool in my mouth. “I am anit, not a he.”
“Why does he keep saying that,why does he keep saying…”
In the end, the lights went out before I could die.
A storm somewhere nearby, the distant sound of constant thunder; lightning struck a pylon perhaps, or maybe the pylon was hit days ago and the farm was functioning on its own power. My cottage on its island can run off a few hours of sunlight a week, but on Adjumir everything is falling apart. Radiation, heat, the moon of Lhonoja blazing above – things fail. Things fall apart. And so, a little before dawn: the lights go out.
Rules bend, in the black. Sounds too big, walls too thin. Expectations crack, warp, crumble. The imagination starts to fill in the gaps, the protective instinct of the living brain seeing everywheredanger, danger, danger. There is a piece of me that will always love the dark, always love coming back to this state, when reality grows thin.
I have always found it fascinating, the stories people tell themselves to bring comfort in the dark. Stories about being special, important, unique. “Valuable” even – but valuable to what? Toother humans? They will fade and die as surely as you will, and what then is your legacy? The words you leave behind? Your carvings made in stone, footprints in the sand? Sooner or later every sun will be a Lhonoja or a red giant that swallows planets whole.
Perhaps this is why so many cultures believe in a life after death. What an extraordinary gift it is to be alive, to be living in this moment – and how much more extraordinary to pass through that same experience without ever having noticed how wondrous it is.
Other tricks of the human brain: the ability to see the colour magenta. No such colour exists in nature, but the mind takes red and blue – the opposite ends of the visible spectrum – and fuses them into something unreal yet, to the mind, true.
The power of prediction to overwhelm sensory experience. If you believe hard enough that you are seeing what you think you see – that perhaps this four-legged creature is a predator set to rip out your throat, rather than a gentler beast – then you will see it, no matter what is actually there. This hallucination is strongest in the dark – with limited data, the brain will always try to fill in the gaps, and the fuel it burns is fear.
The idea of solidity. On an atomic level, matter is more space than it is mass. The experience of touch, of weight and interaction, is not one of mass-on-mass, but force-on-force, field-within-field, repulsing, attracting and repelling.
In the dark, in the deepest black where the travellers go, the rules do not apply.
There is a kind of honesty there, if you look for it.
I rose from my chair.
“Chair” – an object of mass and magnetism. I press against it, it presses against me, fields interacting, bending.
I am dysregulated – that is what the Major would say, what Rencki would blare: Maw, you are dysregulated! You need to focus, come back, remember what it is to be human!
She’s light years away; qe is dead.
Around me: nine organic objects and a gun. They shine somuch more brightly in my vision than they did when crude burning light illuminated them. Some are here because they genuinely think they matter more than someone else, because they cannot fathom how their lives are not important, because in the bottom of their hearts, they actually believe that they are special, that they deserve – no, they areowed– a second chance. The majority are here because they are afraid. Not even the Behkdaz could convince them that the end could be peaceful, that it was simply a breathing-out, a letting-go. Their terror is a mind-shaking thing, an earthquake in the soul.
Ranwha, of course, is here for love. He shouts at me to stay down, tries to knock me back, swinging wildly, blind. His fist interacts with the molecules of my face. He expected a crunch of bone-on-bone, but these things have grown somewhat vague, and he has to force his arm back, yank it free of me like pulling a magnet from an iron bar, gasping at the ice forming about his skin, and finally, at last, even he understands.
Of all the reasons why these people are here, love is the most fascinating.
There is an idea, common to many cultures, that love resides in the heart. This strikes me as a historical hangover from the millennia before we had a proper anatomical understanding of the human body, combined with a romanticisation that does indeed lend itself to all these ideas of special, vital, worthy by means of a soul, et cetera. But I suppose even I can sometimes be subject to the impact of these little narrative tales, which is why as shots rang out and the room shimmered into a familiar, cool place of humming energy and motion, I reached into Ranwha’s chest and pulled out his still-beating heart.
After, when there was nothing else interesting left to do on the farm, I sat on the roof of Ranwha’s speeder and watched the sunrise.
Chapter 20
The first time the people in the laboratory asked me about the things I did, I told the truth.
They seemed very unhappy when I did so, even though they’d asked me to be honest, so the next time I tried lying, to see if it would make them feel better.
I lied badly and said that when an “episode” came over me, I blacked out.
That it was like a great big darkness that rose up and consumed me, and only when it was over did I find myself standing among a pile of the dead/wounded/maimed/dying, and that at the sight of said carnage I felt bad/sad/guilt/regret.
Everyone seemed happier with this explanation, even though it was obviously not true. A few people were correctly terrified. “It can lie,” they said. “What else can it learn to do?”
