“I often wonder,” Agran murmured as she led us throughpressure doors to the slightly lower gravity of Cuxil’s apartment, “if all planets smell, and the inhabitants just don’t notice it.”
“Oh yes!” trilled Cuxil happily. “Even laying aside regional geographic variations – of which there are plenty – everyone is so used to the smell of their ‘normal’ air that they don’t realise itdoessmell! Even if your brain doesn’t have a concept of the smell of oxygen, minute differences in ozone, nitrous and sulphuric compounds can do a number on your sense of ‘normality’. It’s absolutely fascinating – if you get a chance, there’s a wonderful exhibition on tour that allows you to sniff a number of aromas from various planets, without any likely ill-effects.”
Cuxil found most things fascinating. It was one of the things we had in common, and perhaps, in her own way, one of the reasons she had decided not to fear me, despite everything she had been told.
Agran, I thought, feared me.
As soon as Cuxil was through the doors to her room, Agran’s shoulders pulled back, her chin tucked in, her hands locked tight by her sides. I wondered what she’d heard, whether she thought her Spindler manners would crack all the way into the bluntness of an Adjumiri.
If, that was, you could say that Agran was Adjumiri at all.
Was/was not.
She had not walked through the gate, she had not chosen her name. She used the name that had been given to her by her kindlers, perhaps her gender too. Did she know what it was to step from beneath the pillars raised by her ancestors and declare that she was “one whose heart is laughing beneath the endless sky” or perhaps “one who walks on sun-kissed stone”? Did she understand that she was not fixed as this person, this Agran, but that the children of Adjumir were always seeking, always reaching out to find something new in the world around them, inside themselves?
Perhaps not.
Perhaps yes.
Perhaps she knew all of this, and had decided that here, where things were fixed – the same orbital day, the same path from top of Spindle to bottom – there was no room to be anything other than a statue of impermeable stone, drawing no attention in this other place. Gebre had always said ter people would change.
I could only respect whatever decision she had made, and so silently followed her through the Spindle’s star-soaked, sun-bathed halls.
Later, the Executor arrived.
Chapter 36
The official title of the gathering was “The Second Conference on Supernova Event Eighteen”.
Trying to get many people to agree on one thing often produces very bland results. Attempts to name the event something more urgent and dramatic were met by opposing diplomats who didn’t feel the need to get overexcited by the ever-expanding edge of radioactive death sweeping out from the coalescing black hole that was all that remained of Lhonoja’s blasted core. In the end, boring choices that communicated things clearly were fine; thus, the Second Conference was created.
The Spindle was well outside the blast radius of the supernova, which added to its appeal as neutral host. And though there was no formal declaration, it soon became clear that two distinct negotiating groups were forming beneath the soft fountains and hanging orchards of the central groves – those whose worlds would be affected, and those whose worlds would not.
“Would not” was a relative term.
The refugees would come. Millions upon billions would, had, were already fleeing from the Edge, and though a number of more belligerent Accord systems had closed their borders, if given a choice between inevitable radioactive death and a bitter struggleto find a place on a world that rejected you, it turned out to not be a choice at all.
The Executor of the United Social Ventures came to the Spindle in a fully armed warship. The carrier entered the system on its outer edge, in either a Piloting error or a minor concession to the faux pas of bringing a warship to a diplomatic gathering. Whatever the cause, the deceleration time between arcspace exit and docking gave authorities on the Spindle time for some unusual but potent outrage, which was smoothed over only when the Executor assured them that hé was going to take a small, barely defensive-capable corvette from within the cavernous bowels of his battleship the last few million kils to the conference.
“It’s a glorious ‘fuck you’,” was Cuxil’s assessment, as word spread among the delegates. “Strong Shine.”
Cuxil had not been raised to understand Shine, but many minds were now whispering to hers who had been born to it, bred to it, and they knew that nothing was Shinier than boldly breaking all the rules, then making one tiny concession to those who are meant to enforce them, who say thank you, oh but thank you for doing that one little, little thing.
“I don’t think the other delegates appreciate its Shininess,” I mused.
“I don’t think the Executor cares what the delegates think. Hé is more interested in hís domestic audience than the interplanetary one. That in itself is informative.”
Somewhere in the Consensus there are voices from the Shine, debtors and refugees, unionists and rebels, those who watched their loved ones die, who fled weeping, who called out for help and heard no answer. They wash like the gentle sea against the pebble shore of Cuxil’s mind, and though she is so much more than just their voices, yet still she hears them.
I wonder if Cuxil remembers Glastya Row. Any survivors who made it out, made it to the Consensus, would long since be dead bynow, their memories lost with their lives. But perhaps their stories remain still, half forgotten in the souls of those who came after.
The Executor kept the Spindle waiting for over a day during hís long deceleration from hís capital ship, and the Spindle did indeed wait, which told the Executor everything hé needed to know about the people hé was dealing with.
While the orbital held its respectively under- or over-oxygenated breath, I sat on a bench beneath the Slow’s emissary. Despite regular cleaning, the area around the cube was littered with artefacts – children’s toys and pictures of the lost, recordings of sights seen and sounds heard, scientific papers, sealed sample tubes, mathematical problems painted in miniature on titanium plates and left at the feet of the Slow. Sometimes people would come to talk to the emissary, to ask questions (there were no answers) or just chat as one would to an old friend. Mostly, when people came, they prayed. They prayed not to any abstract god, not to some unknown omniscient, but to the Slow qimself, qis emissary recording everything, remembering everything and transmitting it across the void to wherever that great mind rested now.
Please, they’d say.Please.I don’t know what to do.
The quans were the ones who’d named the Slow, since qe didn’t seem inclined to offer any identifier of qis own. There are the same limits on mechanical thought as there are on organic, they’d explained. Energy, time, the data that can be held upon which we base our conclusions. Our memory banks are not infinite – we cannot recall every single thing we’ve seen. And so, just like organics, we take the raw sensory input of our days and shrink it down into stories. Not the wild recollection of the colour blue, or the touch of fingers upon the soil of a strange new world, but rather the story of the experience. A tale that begins “I was here” and “I saw this”, so much shorter, easier to compress than raw sense data.
