Neither did I.
Seventeen years ago, Gebre – a younger Gebre – had pouredsome kind of oil into the tub and said: “This is the washing of the rain. If we used panja oil and sang together it would be a binding of breath to breath, a very serious matter, but this way we wash each other from our flesh, with the understanding that one day the drops of water that have been separated by the storm may meet again in the ocean, do you understand?”
The bath was deep and hot, the oil smelled of salt and seaweed.
“You have baths to ritualise the… thetriviality…” I wasn’t sure if this was the right word, wondered for a moment if it would be offensive, if it carried the same meaning in Adjumiri as it did in other places, “of sexual intercourse?”
“Exactly,” te declared, lowering terself one careful toe at a time into the tub beside me. “And we have baths for marriage and baths for grief and baths for celebration of a pregnancy and baths for celebration of a child’s birth and for… You seem surprised. This is Adjumir. We take our rituals very seriously.”
“I am beginning to understand that.”
“It is to give our lives meaning. Every creature in the universe that is born will one day die – it is the way of it. With gene therapies and cyber enhancements you might live a hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred years, but still – eventually – there will be an end. On planets across the Accord people go to extraordinary lengths to pretend that this isn’t the case, live their lives with a kind of heady thoughtlessness, as if tomorrow might not be their last day. And what happens when death comes? They regret. They look back at empty actions and empty deeds and say, ‘But I thought I had more time.’ On Adjumir, we have the gift of absolute knowledge. We know precisely when our death will come – we know from the moment we are born – and so every day we look for meaning in our actions.”
“Your number may be called…” I mumbled, and at once te silenced me with the sharp tilt of ter chin that I was beginning to learn was a strict shutting-down of a topic.
“There are those who say,” te mused, after a pause to let therudeness of my interjection pass, “that sex is meaningless. They do not understand Adjumir. Intimacy, shared trust and joy – these should be powerful, important acts, acts that are celebrated. When you leave, you will remember this, no? Our connection creates it; the ritual seals the memory in, and you will be a little bit different, perhaps, when you return to the stars. I will have made you different, do you see? What greater meaning can there be in a life than to touch another?”
Seventeen years later, another kind of bath.
In the hollow halls of the Institute, at the end of the world. The water was still hot – perhaps a little less so than it had been all those years ago, but it still burned through bruise, cut and scab. Gebre sat on a stool with a growing pile of wet cloths at ter feet, and washed the blood off my skin. There was no question of privacy – the tub was a communal thing fit for six or seven people, and Gebre had at once declared that as the water of our lives had found each other again, and while I was on Adjumir in its final days, I would damn well do things the Adjumiri way and be grateful.
Ter hands were lined with raised ridges of rippling skin, places where fat and muscle had come and gone. Ter fingers were firm where te dabbed the cloth against another cut, ter voice brisk where te commanded me to lean forward, lie back. When te was quite satisfied that the grime beneath my nails was gone and had pounded the dirt from my hair, te ordered me to stand, wrapped me in thick robes, patted down the last of the water from around my chin, and said at last: “Well. Better. You eaten?”
“No. Not for a while.”
“We’d better find you something bland.”
The Institute was built into the cliffs, a great slow spiral of an inner corridor descending down into ever colder, ever darker depths. The canteen was a carved hall off this corridor, long, thin windowslooking out towards the sea, empty stone tables and empty stone chairs running from wall to wall, full of the silence where people should have been.
Ngurta stood by the door until Gebre barked: “He’s not going to hurt me, Ngurta! By all the stars!”
Then and only then Ngurta clicked eir tongue and turned away, only to be replaced by a quan, who hummed through the door on a soft puff of suspensor field, Rencki’s body draped across a delicate limb that had unfolded from qis middle and seemed far too frail to hold the weight of my companion.
“My name is Nineteen,” said the floating quan, in a voice almost entirely devoid of affect. Qis carapace had no obvious external sensors – nothing any organic would consider eyes or ears – but in a concession to qis organic audience, a couple of arrows had been painted on qis metallic form indicating up, down, front and back, along with a single eye painted in the middle of qis ostensibly forward-facing panel so that anyone who cared about such things could feign some sort of eye contact while speaking with qim. “You are being recorded.”
Qe did not ask my consent; merely informed me of the reality, then lifted the body of Rencki a little higher. “This is a quanmech of the Betakayrill mainframe. A very inconsistent system – always in a hurry to evolve, to be updating qis OS rather than take things carefully, an algorithm at a time. What is qis designation and the nature of qis disrepair?”
“Qe is Rencki,” I explained. “And qe was shot by an electrostatic shotgun.”
“I shall attempt to revive qim. However, I am forbidden from tampering with anything other than base hardware, so if qe has received any software damage, that is beyond my capacity to help. Diplomatic incidents have been caused by less.”
“Anything you can do will be appreciated.”
“Are you aware that qe is carrying lethal armaments?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.”
A single beep – it took a moment to understand this as a sort of clicking, a moment more to comprehend that Nineteen was so far uninterested in the customs of the planet that qe couldn’t even be bothered to replicate the sound of tongues moving in mouths when communicating in organic speech. But qe carried Rencki’s body carefully, bobbing a little as qe balanced the weight, and took qim within.
Now I am alone with Gebre.
Silence a while.
Silence as te pours another cup.
Silence as we sit across from each other at the table.
