The Spindle had no such divide. Indeed, the back corridors of engineering and life support were, if anything, better maintained than the central gardens and generous, planet-watching apartments, since anyone could survive an afternoon on an uncomfortable chair, but even the aka-aka would feel it if the CO2scrubbers failed. It was an inverse of the world I had been born to, the faint smell of algae giving way to the odours of gas-exchange pumps and greased docking hatches, the stained crew I passed considered by the Spindlers among their most high.
I navigated by a digital map passed to the reader in my palm, moving quickly through the slightly lighter gravity of the oxygenation bays, resisting the urge to hop just to see how high I would go. A brown messenger bag bounced against my left hip, the weight of a familiar white box dragging it down. In a narrower corridor behind shield maintenance, the scent of woody incense caught my attention, its drifting clouds billowing from a door marked “Prayer Room, All Peoples Welcome”. As I approached, the smellof dry forest and summer leaves mingled with the faintest chorus of song – not the complex, woven melodies of Adjumir, but the low, grumbling chant of a Lordat, churning through the same prescribed lines again, again, again, again.
I do not fear the darkness that divides the stars
I do not fear the going
The endless night
It is empty
Nothing divides us
Nothing will keep us apart
Whatever the language, whether the words made sense grammatically within it, the Lordat only ever sang these six lines, adjusting the tune if the language was tonal, only adding in linguistic punctuation marks if strictly required. I had flown ships with Lordats, their nasal droning itching at the back of my neck. The credulous hired them to bring good fortune, believed that their prayers kept the dark away, deflected the interest of the black with pure piety and light of soul. The few good meta-studies of flight data with and without Lordat showed little statistical significance in terms of ships lost to the dark, though even that little was judged significant enough by the many, many who feared the black. I had always held to the hypothesis put about by a number of somewhat more cynical researchers that if the Lordat did help keep the dark at bay, it was for no reason of piety or spiritual integrity, but because they were fundamentally gut-churningly dull.
Steeling myself for tedium, I entered the prayer room. There was an altar at the far end with no clear markers of affiliation on which the incense burned. More boxes of incense, candles, electric lights, petals, crystals – every possible object on which some kind of spiritual meaning could have been inscribed – lined the right-hand wall of the room, along with a screen for booking religious ceremonies.
With remote access to spiritual leaders from nearly 2,000 denominations by dedicated tanglecomm, don’t let your prayers go unanswered!
Seats were laid out in neat rows down the length of the room, their comfort and convenience adaptable for all limb lengths and musculatures from all gravitational conditions. The light was low and warm, befitting pious contemplation, and as the final ashes of the incense dropped into the pan, it released a waft of smoke that smelled of autumn draught and withering flowers.
The Lordat stood in front of and a little to the left of the altar, his blue robes without crease, head shaved and polished, scarred hands moving through the same ritual gestures as he chanted. I approached slowly, waiting for him to finish, and on realising that could be a tedious forever, blurted: “Lordat Ulannad?”
The chanting stopped, the sound swallowed so sharply you could perhaps imagine he had not spoken at all. Then he turned, a pair of pale grey eyes set deep in dusty skin fixing on me, looking me up, looking me down, before, without much in the way of rancour, announcing, in perfect Mdo-sa: “You must be the unhallowed spawn of the cursed dark.”
He did not bow, touch fingers to the lips or offer a hand to shake. There were few cultures where such reticence was acceptable, but there was a sort of smile upon his lips, which didn’t seem unkind, so I answered: “My name is Maw.”
He dismissed the name as soon as it was spoken – perhaps he knew it was not truly mine, perhaps he had already heard it was the name of a dead man, a man who had most certainly died, whose blood had been found on my fingers, on my teeth. Or perhaps he was too busy to deal with people – perhaps his mind was set on greater things.
“Come with me,” he barked, and without complaint I followed him to the back of the room, to a smaller door that had a refuge sign on it, opening and closing with the hiss-pop of a double seal into a tiny sanctuary designed to shelter anyone who could make it there in the event of disaster. Ulannad had taken this veryserious cubicle, and rather than keep it prepared for a cataclysmic decompression event had instead filled it to bursting with items of devotion. Books and icons of a hundred faiths, the ritual drums of a Haima rain-call, arguably unnecessary in the vacuum of space, the bottled and preserved eye-stalk of a shaman of the Yellow Ridge, whose sight was said to never die, whose gaze would find the faithful wherever they went. Eyrie lazuli beads and Kzichido dancing shoes (almost certainly fake – hard to weave them to proper theological standards), and among it all, barely peeping out from the mess, a little pendant hanging from a wall – the symbol of two binary suns.
Not a religious object, but a marker of faith nonetheless.
Between these artefacts, wondrous and mundane, Ulannad had created a nest of cushions surrounded by half-read manuscripts from ancient places, perhaps some that hadn’t even been digitised, and as the door hiss-sealed behind us, he flopped into this pile and proclaimed: “I sweep for bugs every day. We can talk.” I looked for a place to sit, found a tiny sliver of space between a shelf of chalices and another of bejewelled shells, bones and horns that the sign above declared must be kept clear for evacuees awaiting rescue, and cautiously lowered myself down. “You don’t look much for a spawn of the unhallowed void,” Ulannad added, his Mdo-sa all continental Cha-mdo, a regional variation I associated with commnet adverts selling dangerous medical products and bad investments in the most reassuring, genial way. “Did you bring it?”
I opened my bag, pulled out the white box from within.
He took it from my hands as if it were an explosive device, cracked the lid open a little, reverent and slow, peeked inside, then, perhaps a little disappointed with what he saw, opened the box all the way.
Inside, a curve of metal, silent and cold.
He said: “Can I touch it?”
“Yes. If you don’t consider touching a thing that has touched the dark too obscene.”
“People have the strangest ideas about Lordat,” he grunted, running a finger along the edge of the device. “They mistake our healthy respect for the night for a kind of piety.”
Carefully he lifted the interface from the box, turned it over in his hands. I looked away, found it hard to see his fascination. My back ached, my ears kept popping. Perhaps the gravity; it was too high in this sanctum, perhaps that was all it was, all it was.
“Where did you get it?” he asked.
“Adjumir. It was… found by a scholar at an institution. Ter name was Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra. It’s called a Tryphon, an arccomms interface. It still works, in its way. Just not enough.”
“I heard the rumours. They said if we could crack the Tryphon, we could take down the blackships, then the Shine. That without the threat of planet-killers, the Accord would join the Unionists in open revolt, would… But if I have learned one thing on the Spindle, it’s that these things are naive. The Accord is far from the beacon of reason and light it paints itself to be. Even if the blackships failed, they wouldn’t risk their own people to attack the Shine. Not for strangers. Not for humanity.”
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked, tilting my chin towards the object in his hand. “What are the Unionists going to do with an interface that doesn’t work?”
