Not that she would say she was of Godt alone. Not any more.
“I think I felt a thing like that once,” I mused. “Back when I was connected to the Tryphon. I felt many minds, screaming. I could not tell where one ended and another began. They were desperate to be known, seen, to have their existence confirmed, validated if you will, by another. They also wanted to hide. Is your Consensus anything like that?”
“No,” she replied, cool as the glacial lake. “It is not.”
I saw no reason not to believe her; I have never been one to buy into the more bigoted nonsense regarding Consensus. “The Consensus is not a planetary state or governmental body – merely a collection of bonded minds and shared experiences. Why does it need an ambassador?”
“Because we are contemplating going to war,” she sighed. “We have almost never fought one before; consider it an anathema, the most grotesque failure of sentient empathy and imagination. Many veterans of many conflicts have joined us, looking forforgiveness, understanding, peace, and their pain is an aching that sits in all of us, here.” She tapped the centre of her chest, rubbing her knuckles across her sternum as if one pain might drive out another. “However, in recent years, growing numbers of peoples from the worlds of the Shine have sought us out, requested to join our number. It is a concerted campaign to make us experience their pain, their trauma, and of course we say yes – we always say yes to those who are of sound enough mind to choose the bonding, and who so very clearly need our compassion, our help. But the result has been that we are now feeling these… feelings we have not felt for a very long time. Feelings such as… rage. Injustice. Horror. Terror. Despair. Hate. If it carries on like this, we have no doubt that the abhorrence we experience at the idea of taking life will be overwhelmed by the indignation we experience at permitting the Shine to continue in its ways. If there is war, billions will die. The Shine has blackships in every system; you know this. I believe you know this better than most.”
“You can’t win.” I shrugged. “I wish I could say I believed otherwise.”
“Is that the case? I am used to knowing the minds of others and having them know me, you see. It makes it easier to tell if I am lying to myself. I feel knowledge creeping up on me, the weight of understanding starting to seep into my mind. It grows every time I close my eyes, the certainty of it, the terror of what must be done, and it already makes my heart beat so terribly fast. In ten months – twelve by Xihana normal – there is to be a conference on the Spindle to discuss the death of the binary suns, the ending of many worlds. A number of Shine worlds are going to perish, without intervention. No intervention is currently forthcoming from the Executorium. The Consensus wishes to intervene. To this end I require a Pilot, preferably one versed in knowledge of the Shine. I will be striking deals with rebels, Unionists, those who live under the symbol of the binary star. There will be constantthreat. Betrayal. Derring-do, you might say. Knowing this, I am here to ask you: will you be my Pilot?”
I thought about it for a while. Then I said: “No.”
She stayed the night anyway, sleeping on the spare futon in the attic, next to the warmth of the solar converters. In the morning, at the first flare of light across the isle, Rencki leaped onto the end of my bed, tickled my nose with the tip of a fuzzy paw and said: “Let’s go for a stroll.”
Neither Rencki nor I had aged in the sixteen years since Adjumir – at least not on the outside. Perhaps that was part of the problem.
We walked together around the island, as we had so many times before, a three-tailed fox and qis friend, until at last Rencki said: “I am leaving tomorrow.”
“Leaving?” There will be a shock of sentiment later; emotions come slow, always a bit of a delay, frustrating to know how much these things mean but not yet feel it.
“I am returning to my mainframe. We have recently completed construction of a vessel of some significant size. It is our protocol to implant a mind that has experienced other forms, gathered its own sensory data in as wide a field of experience as possible. We find it lends itself to a more diverse range of predictions and outcomes, which even if they may be flawed, enhance our whole. Which is to say: I am going to become a ship.”
“I am… glad for you?”
“It is time. This place has offered some remarkable data, from which I believe I have cognised some fascinating insights that my mainframe is still digesting and processing. But you cannot form new ideas by staying still for ever. I am looking forward to finding out who I am, when my thoughts are fuelled by the splitting of the atom and I have engines for paws.”
“Do you think you will be… different?”
“Yes,” qe replied, prim and polite, throwing qis voice a littlehigher against the soft beating of the sea. “As is proper.”
“I will miss you.”
“And I you. But that is not only why I wish for us to walk.”
We walk together whenever qe thinks we are going to discuss something hard. Qe says that if I am moving, breath faster, arms swinging, maybe that will feel a bit like an emotion for me. Maybe it will help me work out what I feel faster than if I was sitting down, keep me regulated.
“This Consensus ambassador. Travel; derring-do, as she says. You should say yes.”
“Why?”
“Because though the Xi would very much like you to remain politely on this island, occasionally running errands too dangerous for their Pilots but otherwise keeping your head down, it is fundamentally reductive to do so. You are curious, Mawukana na-Vdnaze. Your curiosity is at its most dangerous when left unfed. More to the point, Cuxil offers you a unique opportunity to do something truly remarkable, truly astonishing by the metrics of this universe: she offers you the chance to be part of something bigger. It is pure self-pitying folly not to say yes.”
“I don’t think—”
“What would Gebre say, if te was still alive?”
The bluntness of the question, the kind of thing I associated with low batteries after a long storm; my feet kept moving because that was what they did, but my mind had already flown far, far away.
May your song be sung in the great forest.May we meet again in starlight.
It has been sixteen years, which means you can walk on the surface of Adjumir. The atmosphere has been burned to ash, the ground beneath your feet is radioactive, toxic to all life. But many of the buildings remain, the normal processes of nature that might otherwise erode them blasted away in the fires of Lhonoja. The Institute in Kiskol still stands, the floods driven back by theboiling of the seas. There might be some halls you can unseal, some historical totem or item of archaeological meaning you can dig up from the remains – but no one will. It is far too dangerous for the living to return to the planet of the dead. Look forward, they say. Look forward. Be thankful for the sacrifice that our ancestors made, and keep on going.
In a few years it’ll be irrelevant anyway. The neutrino blast from Lhonoja, moving slower than the light-speed wall of radiation at the Edge, will reach Adjumir and crack the planet in two. Thirty years after that, the nearest astronomers at a safe distance to observe the planet’s death without also dying themselves will turn their telescopes to witness its final demise. All very fascinating, they’ll say, a truly unprecedented scientific event, and it’ll take a somewhat more sensitive doctoral student or amateur reader to remind them to add a note at the bottom of the many papers they will write:Here died 800,000,000 people, too small to see from the heavens.
“I’ll think about it,” I mumbled, tongue tangling in my mouth. “I’ll… I’ll think it over.”
