As I got better at understanding my observers, I came to learn the difference between what they asked and what they wanted to know, and lo and behold, everyone decided to believe whatever it was that made them feel better.
It is not that I am not moral, in my own way.
It is simply that sometimes, rather like the rules of physics that should contain me, I forget.
Forgetting is perhaps the best way to express it.
I forget what it is to have skin, and organs, and blood and bones.
I forget the rules I have learned, the languages I speak, the ethics I try to embody and the morals I desperately seek to make my own.
I forget how this universe works, and for a moment am simply… curious.
The play of photons, the taste of hydrogen. The smell of gravity, the soft touch of a boson field, it is so fabulously beautiful, so incredible, so rich and full and fascinating and alive – and there is so much about it I want to learn.
And sometimes.
When I am in a lot of pain.
When nothing makes any sense, all this noise, all this shouting, all this…stuffjust going on all around
I choose to forget.
I do choose it, and only afterwards am ashamed.
Zanlan ran away that night.
While I pulled out their father’s heart. While I reached into the skull of one who tried to stab me, to see if I could hear their thoughts dancing across their brain. As gunshots passed straight through me – as why would they not, being merely energy passing through energy, like electrons shooting in the dark – Zanlan fled.
Do you believe me?
I understand that hurting a child would be abhorrent. When I remember, I remember this most absolutely. The most fascinating thing about children – watching as they discover their own agency, become their own selves – requires time, and it is the opposite of curiosity to interrupt that process. Destroying life when it is so full of prospect is a fundamentally boring act. If you believe nothing else about me, believe that.
Of course, to feel better about this requires another suspension of imagination.
It requires imagining that in sixteen days’ time, Zanlan won’tdie anyway, alone, without family, slowly burned alive in a wave of radiation that will strip the planet to its bones.
Strange, the mental acrobatics people do to try and feel better about this sort of thing.
Sunshine brought clarity; brought reality.
I looked around and saw a lot of dead bodies, and knew I was to blame, and felt like I should curl up on the ground and puke my guts out and weep and beg for forgiveness. But on Adjumir, you carried on anyway.
Thus, as the sun rose, I loaded the body of Rencki into the back of the speeder that had belonged to Ranwha and Zanlan. I was not sure how dead my companion was in the strictest sense of the word. For a quan to die entirely requires a total wiping of their memory systems, their OS, their basic rules of function – and hadn’t qe backed qimself up before we flew? If enough of qis memories survived, would qe learn from this experience of being shot and add a shield generator to qis carapace, and how much of qimself would qe have to give up to create that capacity? Or would qe just keep on making the same mistakes, walking into a scattershot blast and dying again and again, because qe could not keep the memories to learn from qis experience?
The speeder was coded to Ranwha’s DNA, but not life-locked. I dipped a kitchen towel in his blood, activated the engine, coded in our destination, and with Rencki’s blackened body in the back, headed towards Kiskol.
Chapter 21
The Kiskol Institute of Antiquities wasn’t in Kiskol proper, but stood some fifteen tocks from the edge of the town, on top of a storm-blasted, rain-soaked cliff of black stone. Once – years ago – people would come from kils around to visit and go for long walks along the seashore paths or through the grey forests that blanketed it. Its interests ranged from ancient interplanetary ships and the crockery designed especially for them, through to skeletons of the great mega-fauna that had thrived in the first centuries of terraforming, before the pressure of a growing ecosystem and bio-engineers in their orbital habitats forced change upon some, extinction upon others. Mostly it was a place for academics, its only concession to the outside world being a café serving a kind of heavy biscuit and pots of kol to the local walkers, sometimes tricking them into its more esoteric displays while they were looking for the toilets.
No more, of course. Now, no families came, no kinn from the towns and the cities. The Institute’s gate stood open beneath the rising dawn of a new day, but the windows were shuttered where they faced the sea, and in a courtyard within its black stone walls there was only a vigil truck and a half-empty drone hub, its hooks hanging with burned-out machines and gutted parts. Where once hundreds of researchers, students and makers of kol hadtaken up residence in the long dormitories cut into stone, now just twenty-nine, all numberless, gathered together in this place. The oldest was ninety-six, the youngest in their late twenties, and they greeted the dawn and sang out the ending of the day together, and one of their number had done the short-course training as a Behkdaz, the emergency three-week programme that had been opened up to the population as a whole when the Lovers finally went supernova, and was authorised to issue Grace, and still didn’t feel especially comfortable with their calling.
I arrived in the mid-afternoon, parked my speeder in a yard of carefully raked stones that were starting to be overgrown with tangling weeds and wilting flowers confused by the season, and no one was there to greet me, and I didn’t know where to go.
I crawled out of my vehicle, Rencki heavy in my arms, called out: “Hello?”
Behind the walls the sea wind shuddered, and the clouds skimmed busy, weighty overhead. In the centre of the yard, a blasted white tree, its branches saggy with little silver bells and tangles of paper – no chimes here, a slightly different flavour of remembering, of saying goodbye.
