It is I who break the silence, who blurt the thing that I will die if I do not express: “You are surprised to see me.”
Te takes a moment to answer, circumspect in my presence perhaps, having washed so much blood away. “Yes,” te says at last. “I am.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why? Because it is the end of the world, Maw. It is the end of the world. And you and I… I had made my feelings clear, had I not?”
“You made your feelings clear. But then you sent for me.”
“I… What?”
“You sent for me. By name. Hulder, the Major…”
“I don’t know who these people are.”
“They came to my door. Said you had discovered something, that you requested me, by name, that… They lied.”
The knowledge is a rock thrown onto my chest. There will be no shifting it.
Te stared down at ter cup for a long while, then up at me. I do not know what it took for ter to do so, but I was grateful for it.
“Maw,” te breathed, “I think you should tell me everything.”
So I did.
Chapter 23
There is a peculiar manifestation of social cohesion that I have, with some dread, observed in most societies I have visited: “small talk”.
It is fascinating how many people experience a measurable physiological response to the smallest of small talks. “Isn’t the weather foul?” or “I see the shuttle is late again”, and “Oh Iknow!” comes the reply, and if you were to scan for blood pressure, sweat production, hormonal response, etc., you would observe noticeable relaxation.
I myself have developed several algorithms for doing small talk when it is required, in order to help other people feel secure in my presence and thus improve my overall well-being through social cohesion. But what I struggle with is how this simple thing often escalates into a whole cultural performance. For having expressed “Hello, I see you, and you see me”, a veritable avalanche of small talk must then continue in which the participants go to extraordinary lengths to continue to talk about absolutely nothing of any significance or merit whatsoever, in a process that neither party seems to enjoy past the initial moment of connection. It is as if having established that each sees the other, they then agree by mutual consent tonot look too closely, just in case they see something vulnerable, hurting, true.
Or stranger still: you open with “Hello, isn’t the weather foul?” and before you know it, that little open door results in a flood of “Well actually my mother died yesterday and I’ve got a dreadful lung infection and it’s not getting better and I’ve been struggling to get out of bed in the mornings and my children won’t speak to me but you know, you know, it is what it is, isn’t it?”
Under no circumstance must you say something meaningful in response to this; merely listen politely and reply, “That must be hard for you”, even if what you are hearing is a kind of death.
A little connection, but never too much. This is the normality of the interaction, but the rules on how little is too little, how much is too much are never clear or explained. You are meant to “feel it out” and woe betide you if you get that judgement even marginally wrong, for then all connection is lost and you are other, other, other, and must alone continue, shunned for breaking a law that was never codified, violating a trust whose limits were never clear.
Gebre never bothered with small talk. I don’t think it occurred to ter to even try.
I told my story, and at the end of it, te shook ter head, clicked ter tongue three times in the roof of ter mouth, and ter hands danced in anger and indignation even though ter voice was level and low. Finally te said: “Your accent has got worse.”
These are placeholder words. They are the words you say because, on Adjumir, silence is almost as rude as pointing.
“I did a refresher – Assembly Adjumiri.”
“Of course,” te tutted. “The whole Accord is going to think we all sound like that, in a few years. All those Adjumiri children trying to teach off-worlders… or perhaps I should say all those off-worlder Adjumiris trying to teach the children of the worlds on which they now find themselves how to speak proper Adjumiri, and all the lessons are going to be boring Assembly norm. The dialects, the nuances, the songs – they’ll be gone in a matter of years, just footnotes in an archive.”
I couldn’t disagree, knew better than to try.
“At least you remember some vocabulary,” te added, brightening a little. “And your etiquette, should you ever go to a bathhouse on Adjapar, will be old-fashioned but excellent.”
“Gebre…”
“I didn’t send for you. I have received a device, and I did alert the Assembly. But I thought they would send someone… military. Someone from an agency. Or no one at all. Not you.”
“Well,” I replied. “Well. It seems we have both been tricked.”
