Hís presence was fleeting, a taste like the last flash of sunset. Hé was screaming just like everyone else, and then hé was gone.
They ran the coordinates I gave them, said it was a place a ship may have been, but there was nothing there any more. I demanded to go back in, and after I had been checked over by the doctors, they eventually let me, and the howls of minds that were touched by the dark were iron on my throat, and did not trouble me half as much as the light in my eyes when I wakened.
The next day, Adjumir burned.
There was no footage of it. Nothing could survive to record what was happening; nothing could transmit what it saw through the force of radiation that sheared the planet’s atmosphere apart like a fist through paper. No one knew exactly what it was like when eight hundred million people died; no voices were heard screaming; no graves were marked. In a way, that was a kind of mercy, the galaxy collectively letting out a sigh of relief that it would not have to think too particularly on all that was burning, all that was lost. Equally, the silence left room for cognitive doubt. Had Adjumir really died? Was the land really salted with the bodies of so many millions of people? The mind finds it far harder to imagine a negative, an absence of a thing, than almost anything else.
This is the negative space where Adjumir had been.
This is the absence left that Gebre should have filled.
Te is filling it still, of course. The shape of ter is in my mind, even when everything else has been blown away.
PART 3
How the Shine Went to War
Chapter 33
Some four hundred light years from the collapsed husk of Lhonoja, there is an orbital habitat called the Spindle. It drifts around the gas giant known as Mama Ryukch, a silver needle piercing the dark. Centuries old, it is the embodiment of that ancient question: if every hull panel and water recycler, every circuit board and viewing pane, every solar panel and EM field condenser has been changed at least once over the course of the station’s life, is it still the same station?
The inhabitants of the Spindle, who are bored of hearing this question, snap their fingers in indignation. Of course it is, they exclaim. Of course it is! The Spindle is not metal and silicon! It is our home! Though every part of it and us may change and evolve,homeis universal!
The Spindle was built as a comms exchange. At its height it held over forty-five thousand tanglecomm pairs, with operators boasting that a ship carrying just one half of a pair could, through its connection with the Spindle, be patched through to more destinations than any other exchange in the galaxy. For a while, nearly all of the Spindle’s population had worked on the exchange, turning a one-to-one communications tool into a sprawling network of connection, all without the faff – and danger – of trying to communicate through arcspace. Their promise was vast interplanetarycoverage, responsive customer service and, of course, absolute discretion.
Naturally, such promises were nothing if not lures for competitors and data miners, resulting in rival exchanges popping up all over the place promising the highest security or the cheapest service or the most obscure connections to the furthest corners of the Accord. As these rivals grew, the Spindle diversified, adding a range of diplomatic services from customisable atmospheric and gravitational meeting areas through to mediation councils versed in the cultural and linguistic niceties of every major and minor civilisation known. Everyone knew you got more done in person, or at least appeared to do as far as public relations were concerned, and your ambassadors would experience neither anaphylaxis nor atmos-induced deep-vein thrombosis during meetings in these well-appointed halls: that was the Spindle guarantee.
At first these services were used only occasionally, talked about by few despite the relentless advertising campaign plugged into the holding music of the tanglecomm exchange. A few commercial deals were hammered out; a border skirmish was settled before it could become anything more.
Then they found the Slow.
It was possible that qis emissary had been there for decades without anyone noticing. They discovered it sitting behind a maintenance panel in a particularly boring section of internal aquatics, a box two metrics by two metrics, perfectly black, without marking or indentation, its matt surface cool to the touch. When questions were asked of it, it made no reply, and, as with all things Slow, it was entirely impervious to scan, absorbing the signals that were thrown at it without even bothering to warm a little in the attempt.
Some on the Spindle argued for its ejection into space. Others said it was a sign, indicative of just how important their work was, how vital their efforts could be. In the end, this latter group won, largely because everyone likes to feel important, and the emissary was moved from aquatics to a plinth in the middle of the centralplaza, so that those who walked beneath it could know that for whatever reason, the single most powerful mind in the universe was watching.
A few people worshipped it. A few people always do.
Others said they wouldn’t come to the Spindle while it was there, but more came than left, drawn by the idea that what happened here might beimportant. That in a hundred, maybe even two hundred, maybe a thousand years’ time, the Slow might speak, might pronounce a conclusion from qis great calculations, and that might be because ofthem, because of something qis emissary had observed on the Spindle. Over time, even the doubters became habituated to the Slow’s black box, sitting on its plinth in the middle of a water garden. The Slow simply didn’t do enough to merit anyone’s especial anxiety.
Then Lhonoja, the supernova, the death of Adjumir, Exodus. I imagined most people had never heard of Glastya Row, wouldn’t know what had happened there – and indeed, most people did not. But the sign of the binary sun was spreading across the Shine, and millions, billions of Adjumiris were waking up under foreign skies, and at the beginning of the end, there had been the Slow. Not that qe had spoken since that first, world-shaking pronouncement. If qe was a god, as philosophers sometimes argued qe could be seen to be, qe showed very little sign of caring.
Despite this, it was on the Spindle that the Accord at last gathered, sixteen years after the death of Adjumir, to discuss the scouring of worlds.
Ambassadors came from all across the civilised world. Humans, of course, and quans – and more besides. The scuttling aka, uke and fujiva came from worlds hundreds of light years away, the outer wings of the station pressurised to just the right chemical consistencies, gravity tweaked up and down for these astonishing arrivals and their very personal preferences. It was unusual – so incredibly unusual – for non-humans to interest themselves in these affairs of state. Distance, culture, simple atmospheric needs all stood aspolite barriers between various species and giving a damn, and yet here they were.
People whispered:Does the Slow speak to them too?and inevitably the answer was yes, even if they didn’t talk about it. The Slow did not care about the layout of your internal organs or the shape of your limbs. Only life interested qim.
To everyone’s surprise, the Shine came too.
And so did I.
Chapter 34
The first time I met her, standing by the docks of my little island, Cuxil said:
“My name is Cuxil, and I am an ambassador for the Consensus. My consciousness is shared with millions of individuals of diverse memories. This does not mean that I feel what they feel all the time, nor that they feel what I do; rather, our emotions, our instincts, our joys and our fears wash through each other at the speed of a dream, knowledge surfacing from within ourselves as we seek it, though it was not ours, and emotions seeping through us from the experiences of our kin, so that we know we are afraid but may not know exactly why. Above all else – to be Consensus is to be seen and known for every part of who you are, and to be loved for it. I am naked in the minds of ourselves, and we are naked in my mind, and I love all of us, and we all love each other. Do you understand?”
It was the season to build the compost heaps high, to let the greytips run wild across the resting vegetable patches, to trim back overheavy branches and pickle the last of the sticky fruits in syrupy vats. Instead I stood upon a shingle shore, watching this stranger who’d come to my home with unabashed curiosity. I knew she had been told to satisfy – that was not the word; the word wassate– my curiosity. To appease that ever-gnawing, ever-hungry thing.Physically, she was an almost textbook illustration of a woman of Godt, one of the few tidally locked planets where a human population had even tried to eke out habitation in the wind-blasted edge between day and night, while hardy choik floated between, seemingly oblivious to the frozen cold, the blood-boiling heat. Her frizzy reddish hair was turning snow white at the roots, her olive skin made warmer by dancing freckles and her clothes a dazzling patchwork array of spring greens and flashes of silver, sunset crimson and dirty gold. As soon as they were old enough to hold a needle, the people of Godt learned how to sew, constantly amending their garments with patches and ribbons taken from the gowns of friends or lovers, or from some memorial of a great event, so that they wore their life’s history in their robes, a record of who they were and where they’d come from that was entirely, immediately legible to another of that world, a dazzling, meaningless spectacle for everyone else who tried to understand the meaning in the cloth.
