“I do a lot of gardening. I lift a lot of dirt.”
“I never pictured you as a gardener. You enjoy it?”
“I think so. I think the word is ‘content’ – is that right? In Adjumiri, is that the right word?”
“Yes. I think it probably is.”
“Have you been… content?”
“Yes. I have. I cannot imagine being content in a world where you didn’t know the day of your death. I find myself wondering what would motivate you, what would make you strive to do… anything really, if you didn’t have the privilege of knowing when your life would end.”
“You’re not coming to theEmni, are you?”
“Let’s not talk about this now. Later. We’ll discuss it… later.”
There was very little later left on Adjumir, but in that moment, te didn’t seem to care. We stood together a little while longer, watching the light moving over the sea.
Then the Shine came.
Chapter 28
Iwas in the audio archive when it happened.
Thousands of years of music had already been beamed off-world, but there was always more – so much more. Here, the oral history of the deep-sea divers of the Yellow Isles; there the sound of a jungle bird famed for its mimicry, calling out “Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?” This is the song the first peoples sang when the last terraformer left this world; this is the sound of the plague doctor who survived the first scourge, when a should-have-been-harmless virus from another planet killed nearly a sixth of the nascent population.
“I need you to listen,” Gebre declared, and for a moment it was there again, the terror, the deep-down, loveless, never-to-be-loved terror that had been with ter since the day te was born. “Maw. It’s incredibly important that you listen.”
I asked ter what te wanted me to remember, the lesson te wanted me to take with me when all this was gone. I thought perhaps te would say that in the moments in which these voices lived, they brought joy, knowledge, inspiration, togetherness. That they touched the lives around them, which flourished and grew, and that if everything leads to death then surely it is in these moments of living, these precious moments of being alive, that we find meaning, purpose, joy.
Just this once, te did not. Even Gebre sometimes needed to mourn, and be afraid.
I kept on thinking I should say so many things – and then there were too many to say. So we walked without speaking between walls of memory banks that ran up and down the hollow expanse of the hall, punctuated here or there by headsets and the occasional not very comfortable chair. The great cavern of the archive only had one window, long and narrow as it faced the sea, tucked in from exposure to the elements, muffling the sound of the growing storm outside.
When I heard the first gunshot, I thought perhaps it was thunder.
Then I heard another, and it was inside the building, the rumble of displaced air from a high-power weapon snapping through the archive. Gebre seemed perfectly comfortable ignoring it, engrossed in a story that would never be heard again – but I caught ter sleeve, hissed: “Listen.”
“It’s the storm.”
“No. Listen.”
Te stopped.
Te listened.
We waited.
From a headset hanging off the wall, a voice proclaimed the history of their home, of how they had once been seafarers, how much further down there was to go and keep on going…
Then it came again.
A snap-crack somewhere within the building, and this time the gunshot must have been near the great winding throat of the place, that long corridor curling through the hillside, because it caught the sound and bounced it down and down like a kind of apology. My fingers tightened on Gebre’s arm, and I whispered: “Gunfire.”
Te opened ter mouth to say of course not, of course it isn’t, but even as te tried to speak the words, te couldn’t quite believe them, and instead breathed: “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Numberless?”
